Immerse In Masahisa Fukase Penned By Masahisa Fukase Accessible As Hardcover

Fukase, like many Japanese photographers of his generation, became known outside his country thanks to his books, including the bestknown The Solitude of Ravens,
His works are rare and negotiated at high prices between collectors, such as the one he dedicated to his cat Sasuke and that the latter signed with his pads.

This monograph, published on the occasion of a retrospective at FOAM in Amsterdam, offers an insight into the work of the Japanese photographer who left us inafteryears in a coma.

The texts signed by Simon Baker, director of the European House of Photography and Japanese photography specialist, and Tomo Kosuga, director of the Masahisa Fukase archives, complete this very beautiful object.

the extreme solitude and even sometimes, the loneliness Anyone with even a passing interest in Japanese photography has already come across the name Masahisa Fukase, Hisbook Karasu Ravens, depicting the titular animal across dozens of years in pictures strangely emotive and personal, is a giant of the field, If you're like most of us, you've never been able to afford a copy of your own, contenting yourself instead with the occasional reprinted spread in a magazine article or images found online.
Last year, the Masahisa Fukase Archives finally reprinted Karasu in an affordable edition, This year, they've followed it up with a careerspanning retrospective on Fukase's work, the first of its kind anywhere, and goddamn is it worth the wait,

So much of the discussion about Fukase has centered around Karasu that to see his other work presented so luxuriantly is a revelation, His "Kill the Pig!" exhibit is a striking juxtaposition of strangely beautiful images of a slaughterhouse contrasted

with the entwined nude bodies of Fukase and his pregnant wife though this reproduction vexingly leaves out the tragic core of the series, two photos of their stillborn baby, which the text informs us was placed at the LaGrange point between the two photo sets.
Other series are less immediately striking but reward deeper examination: a series of family photos which begin mundanely, then grow both more intimate and more comedic as the families are posed facing away from the camera, and then with increasingly fewer items of clothing a series of photographs of cracks on the streets, blown up and painted over by hand largeformat Polaroids of multimedia works Fukase created with items found on hand in the house a striking sequence of color photographs.
And through it all, a return to Fukase's guiding obsession, his ravens, shown here in seven separate series,

This is excellent stuff, and not to be missed, .