Vortex

by Kikuji Kawada

On September 5th, 2018, in one of his early Instagram posts, Kikuji Kawada shared a photograph of a poster that read: "Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt." This quote, by Kurt Vonnegut, is extracted from his masterpiece "Slaughterhouse-Five," praised as "one of the most enduring antiwar novels of all time." Vonnegut, an American novelist born of German parents, enlisted in the U.S. Army during World War II. Captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge, he was taken as a prisoner of war in Dresden, where he survived the Allied bombing in a meat locker of the slaughterhouse where he was detained. This experience provided the traumatic substance of his novel, but also the somewhat comedic undertone of the style that he came to be known for. His work became an emblem of American post-war counterculture. It seems quite fitting that Kawada would pick Vonnegut's words and make them his own through the prism of social media. He tagged this post with "#kurtvonnegutjr," "#スローターハウス5" and "#なにもかもうつくしく" : "Everything is beautiful."

A few hours later, that same day, he posted another photograph: Rows of cars in flames in the aftermath of a typhoon, as seen in the news, on a TV screen. The poetic irony of this sequence echoes Vonnegut's quote, and Kawada's entire oeuvre, starting with "Chizu (The Map)."

Genres: Photography, Japan

544 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 2022

About the author

Kikuji Kawada (川田 喜久治 Kawada Kikuji, born 1933) is a Japanese photographer. He co-founded the Vivo photographic collective in 1959 with Akira Sato, Eikoh Hosoe, Ikko Narahara, Akira Tanno and Shomei Tomatsu. He was one of the fifteen artists selected for the “New Japanese Photography” exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1974. He was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Photographic Society of Japan in 2011.

(from Wikipedia)