Thread. In 2020, I came across Masahisa Fukase's photos. I absolutely loved his bio and very interesting style.
Born in Hokkaido, Fukase's family ran a photo studio in a small town.
Although the photographer had moved to Tokyo permanently in the 1950s to further his studies and career, he still felt a strong emotional bond with his hometown.
Fukase’s 1986 book Karasu, also known as The Solitude of Ravens, is his most notable piece of work.
Karasu documents Fukase’s heartbreak, loneliness, and loss after his divorce from his wife. His main subjects, ravens, symbolises his solitude.
It is not ravens' freedom Fukase was drawn to, but rather their solitary nature, their otherness.
The Japanese photographer focused obsessively on his wife and muse Yoko from the day they met till the day she left.
Yoko is also the subject of a fascinating series called From Window that Fukase made in 1974.
In 1977, Fukase turned his lenses on his new companion Sasuke.
Growing up with felines, he decides with the arrival of this new cat in his life that it would become a photographic subject in his own right, fascinated by this creature full of life named after a legendary ninja.
In 1992, just before his 60th birthday, Masahisa Fukase was leaving his favourite bar when he tumbled down the stairs, causing a traumatic and irreversible brain injury that left him incapacitated.
Photo: Slaughter, 1963 © Masahisa Fukase
Fukase remained that way until his death 20 years later.
Even before his life-changing accident, however, Fukase was an insular character.
"I kept dragging loved ones into my work in the name of photography, but I never could make anybody happy that way — not even myself."
He spoke of a wish to be dead, and of photography as being a form of “revenge against still being alive”.
Ravens: Noctambulant Flight, 1980 Archives © Masahisa Fukase
Yoko visited him twice a month throughout his long limbo – though, heartbreakingly, he would have been unaware of her presence.
“He remains part of my identity,” she said, adding: “With a camera in front of his eye, he could see; not without.”
Photo: 1980 © Masahisa Fukase
© Masahisa Fukase
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