Kazuo Kitai built his reputation documenting protest movements in Japan during the 1960s and 1970s; his first collection, titled “Resistance,” was published in 1965. Iroha finds him returning to his own photographic archives — faces, bodies under tension, marching crowds, fragments of resistance — but not to reprint them. Instead he tears his silver prints and covers them with paint, transforming photography into raw material. The documentary becomes abstraction; the image becomes a surface for a hybrid form, somewhere between calligraphy and painting. Helmeted men, workers, police officers, students, inhabited streets and suspended objects survive as grounds for gesture; vivid colour and the Japanese characters “I,” “RO” and “HA” — the first syllables of the traditional kana order — restate first principles, joined by the numerals “1, 2, 3,” typically recited as a countdown before setting something in motion.
The publisher frames the book as a deliberate break in his practice: it is no longer about bearing witness, but about reinterpretation, questioning the creative act at the end of a cycle. The tension between image and intervention — between reportage and mark-making — is the substance of the series, and the sequencing, by editor Cécile Poimboeuf-Koizumi, gives that tension a paced argument rather than a survey. Design is by Poimboeuf-Koizumi in collaboration with Perrine Serre.
Chose Commune issues the work as 80 pages containing 44 black-and-white photographs hand-coloured with paint, released unbound as sheets in a folder closed with a red rubber band, at 24 by 31.5 cm. That unbound format treats the sequence as loose, reorderable material and keeps the physical object close to the working method it documents. Text appears in French, English and Japanese; the publication date is December 2025.
For a collector, the interest lies in the conjunction the book stages — a documentarian of postwar Japan subjecting his own prints to a late, insistently physical revision, in an edition whose form echoes the gesture. It is a considered addition alongside Kitai’s earlier books, and a useful object for thinking about what photography does when it stops testifying and starts painting.
