Following the Japanese-language release of the 2018 Masahisa Fukase retrospective, French publisher Xavier Barral follows up with an English version.
Thanks to extensive editorial work by Tomo Kosuga (director of the Masahisa Fukase Archives) and Simon Baker (director of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie), the book lays out the career and private life of one of Japan’s most innovative and radical photographers of his generation.
Through thoughtful text and representative works selected from 26 of Fukase’s series (famous series such as The Solitude of Ravens or Memories of my Father, collages, underwater self-portraits, and images combining painting with photography), this comprehensive book manages to both showcase the genius and inimitable allure of Fukase’s photography as well as explore what it was that Fukase was seeking to achieve in his medium.
Masahisa Fukase
Born in 1934 on the island of Hokkaido, in the north of Japan, into a family of studio photographers, Masahisa Fukase began a career as a freelance reporter in the late 1960s. In 1971 he published his first photography book, consisting of group portraits of his family. In 1974, he cofounded the Workshop Photography School with Shomei Tomatsu, Eikoh Hosoe, Noriaki Yokosuka, Nobuyoshi Araki and Daido Moriyama; that same year, MoMA in New York dedicated a milestone exhibition to them (New Japanese Photography). In 1992, at the age of 58, following a fall, Fukase was maintained on life support until his death in 2012.
