Dark night rising: the photographer who captured the mystery of the eclipse

Kawada has said the images in The Last Cosmology were inspired by the stormy landscapes of the expressionist painter Emile Nolde, who said: “All important things in art have always originated from the deepest feeling about the mystery of Being.” To this end, the strange skies full of lunar portents, forks of lightning, fleeting meteorites and blocked out suns are a kind of mirror of Kawada’s brooding, troubled soul. He spent his youth in the long shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and made the images in The Last Cosmology between 1980 and 2000 – a time of global uncertainty.