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CHIZU (THE MAP) BY KIKUJI KAWADA

“No photobook has been more successful in combining graphic design with complex photographic narrative… [as its] various layers inside [are] peeled away like archaeological strata, the whole process of viewing the book becomes one of uncovering and contemplating the ramifications of recent Japanese history — especially the country’s tangled relationship with the United States… His photographs are a masterly amalgam of abstraction and realism, of the specific and the ineffable, woven into a tapestry that makes the act of reading them a process of re-creation in itself. In the central metaphor of the map, in the idea of the map as a series of interlocking trace marks, Kawada has conjured a brilliant simile for the photograph itself: scientific record, memory trace, cultural repository, puzzle and guide…”

[Extract : The Photobook: A History, Volume 1, by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger]