Masahisa fukase photography

Overwhelming, whimsical, sad and affecting: the body of work Masahisa Fukase left behind when he passed away in is unlike any other. Exposing his inner self to the world, the Japanese photographer produced an autobiography in images that folded life and art into an impossible unity — without ever flinching away from the realities of death.

It was only last year, in the build-up to his overdue retrospective in Tokyo, that missing prints emerged from their dusty hiding places.

Masahisa fukase coma

However, in the spring of that year, he travelled to his hometown in Hokkaido to take funerary portraits of his parents. Upon his return, he embarked on an intense period of fixation with Yoko, shooting her throughout the summer from their home on a suburban housing estate. With a resolutely ritualistic approach, Fukase photographed Yoko heading off to work every morning from his fourth-floor window using a telephoto lens.

Other times she appears disgruntled and bored. Forever poised between game and despair, the push and pull of performance reveals how fantasy intervenes in every attempt to see and be seen. Fukase obsessively photographed the people and cats around him, expressions of love which wound up as destructive. Having already experienced periods of strain in their relationship, Fukase was determined to create a formal record of his wife while they remained married.

That is, before the inevitable occurred.