Mask is the twenty-fifth installment in Nazraeli Press’s One Picture Book Two series and Kikuji Kawada’s first contribution to it. The publisher had already issued two earlier books on Kawada, whose 1965 volume The Map (Chizu) remains a landmark of postwar Japanese photography, an unsparing meditation on the trauma of World War II and the westernization that followed. That work and the bodies of work after it have been exhibited and collected internationally, shaping several generations of photographers. Mask extends that record with a series Kawada made in the mid-1970s.

The book presents all eleven images from the Mask series, printed as duotone plates. This is the first time the eleven images have been published together, which gives the volume a documentary value beyond its modest scale: readers can encounter the group as a body rather than through isolated reproductions. The duotone process suits Kawada’s tonal register, and the small format asks for close attention rather than display.

Mask is a hardcover book of sixteen pages, measuring six by eight and a half inches, with the eleven plates accompanied by an original signed photograph. It is limited to five hundred numbered copies, each containing a five-by-seven-inch print signed by the artist. That pairing of a defined group of images with a signed print places the book within a recognized collector’s format, while the modest page count keeps the emphasis on the photographs themselves.

For collectors of Kawada’s work, or of postwar Japanese photography more broadly, Mask addresses a specific gap: it brings a mid-1970s series into print as a group for the first time, in a considered publisher’s edition. Its interest lies less in scale than in access.