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川田喜久治 Kikuji Kawada — Lucky Strike, from the series The Map
川田喜久治 Kikuji Kawada

Lucky Strike, from the series The Map

A crumpled Lucky Strike cigarette package fills the frame in Kikuji Kawada's haunting gelatin silver print, its familiar branding rendered strange and almost archaeological through the artist's intense, close-up lens. Part of his seminal series *The Map* (1960–65), the image transforms an ordinary piece of American consumer debris into a charged symbol of postwar Japan's fraught relationship with Western culture and occupation. Kawada's high-contrast, texture-rich printing technique imbues the mundane object with a sense of decay and historical weight, as if it were a relic unearthed from the ruins of a bombed landscape.

Medium
gelatin silver print, printed 1986

🔨 Auction Lot

20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale

November 10, 2015

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About this work

川田喜久治 Kikuji Kawada, Lucky Strike, from the series The Map

A crumpled Lucky Strike cigarette package fills the frame in Kikuji Kawada's haunting gelatin silver print, its familiar branding rendered strange and almost archaeological through the artist's intense, close-up lens. Part of his seminal series *The Map* (1960–65), the image transforms an ordinary piece of American consumer debris into a charged symbol of postwar Japan's fraught relationship with Western culture and occupation. Kawada's high-contrast, texture-rich printing technique imbues the mundane object with a sense of decay and historical weight, as if it were a relic unearthed from the ruins of a bombed landscape.

Medium
gelatin silver print, printed 1986
Seen at
Phillips, New York, London, Hong Kong

Related themes

Japanese Photographer, Dark Mood, Conceptual Photography, Post-War Japan, Dark Moody Tone, Found Object Subject, Male Artist, Postwar Japan, Documentary Style, 20th Century Artist, Americana Imagery, Postwar Photography, Japanese Artist, Twentieth Century Photography, Documentary Photography, Black and White Photography, Gelatin Silver Print, Sequential Series, Established Artist, Experimental Photography, Somber Mood, Black and White, Still Life