First came love, then abandonment and despair. Her name was Yoko Wanibe. She had arrived in Tokyo from Kanazawa in the summer of 1963, when photographer Masahisa Fukase (Bifuka, Hokkaido, 1934-2012) photographed her for the first time. A year later they got married. During the almost 12 years that their life together lasted, the Japanese artist would obsessively photograph his wife. A fixation that he had already expressed during his first marriage, during which he incessantly portrayed his first wife, Yukiyo Kawakami, who appears portrayed in Yugi (Homo Ludence), the artist’s first photobook, published in 1971.
In the summer of 1974, even though his second attempt at marriage had already experienced enough ups and downs, the photographer found a new formula to give free rein to his uncontrollable compulsion. Every morning, the moment Yoko left her apartment building on her way to work at an art gallery in Tokyo, Fukase would shoot her camera using a telephoto lens from the window of her apartment on the fourth floor of a building. suburban residential complex. A ritual that would end up shaping Yoko, from Window. There are 20 portraits belonging to the series that are exhibited this June within the programming of the new edition of Getxophoto. Although the previous celebration of the festival called for a pause, this last one encourages PLAY, as a motto, in a vindication of the game as a central activity in the history of humanity, basic in learning, and in that aspect associated with the arts. It should be noted that the festival has always paid special attention to the Japanese photography scene. Hence, throughout its eighteen editions the work of artists such as Takashi Homma, Sohei Nishino, Toshinori Mizutani and Ken Kitano, among others, has been included.
From inside the Ereaga elevator, during the journey that connects the beach area with the city, the viewer will go through the variety of poses and attitudes offered by the protagonist—some forced, others natural; Sometimes she greets, smiles, plays, other times she appears bored and upset. “Although the game is understood as a space of freedom, it is true that, sometimes, it is characterized by the opposite: the existence of precise rules that the participants must accept,” says María Ptqk, curator of the festival. Even so, a tug-of-war is reflected in the series where it is seen that Yoko’s experience as a trained actress sustains a balance that alters the traditional power dynamic between the artist and her model.
Yoko, from Window It was published during the seventies in the Japanese magazine Camera Mainichi. Later, it would mysteriously disappear for decades, only to reappear in the photographer’s archives in recent years. During the seventies, several Japanese photographers began publishing intimate photos of their women and companions, including Nobuyoshi Araki, author of Yoko my Love (1978). In the same way, Emmet Gowin recorded his personal and emotional world in the United States. However, Wanibe’s role transcended the stereotype of muse. “They were moments of suffocating awkwardness interspersed by violent and almost suicidal flashes of excitement,” Yoko claimed, after her divorce, in an article published in Camera Mainichi, titled The incurable egoiste: “We lived together for 10 years, but he only saw me through a lens, I think all my photos are actually photos of himself.” A kind of reflection that allowed the author to delve more deeply into himself. The publication of Yoko (Asahi Sonorama), in 1978, two years after their separation, showed the tumult of those years spent as a couple.
Whether it was his wife, his family, other people, or animals, the subjects acquired for Fukase the value of a symbol of his own existence, of the deepest part of himself. Hence, throughout his career the author will shape his own autobiography in the form of images, where the border between art and life is blurred, helped by the exquisite mastery of technique and his ability to capture the essence of existence beyond mere representation.
“I photograph to stop everything,” the author would once say. “In that sense, my work could be a type of revenge against the drama of living.” The artist developed an important practice within a group of photographers, including Issei Susa, Araki and Daido Moriyama associated with what would later be known as Shishashin or photograph of the Self; a mix between fiction and reality that seeks to provoke an emotional response or confusion. Fukase was part of the founders of the Photography School Workshop (Wākushoppu shashin gakkō), influenced by Japanese counterculture and the innovative group of postwar photographers gathered in the exhibition New Japanese Photography, organized by John Szarkowski in 1974 at MoMA, with the aim of introducing Japanese photography to the West. However, it was a book: Ravens, as dark and melancholic as his own life, the one that catapulted him to international fame. Published in 1986, it has been recognized as one of the most influential photobooks of recent decades. In Europe it was published under the title The Solitude of Ravens (the loneliness of the crows)
PHotoEspaña presents in its latest edition, 37 images, of the almost 90 that make up the series, within an exhibition that can be seen in the Minerva room of the Círculo de Bellas Artes, Ravens, 烏. It is the most complete selection that has been exhibited worldwide, in which all the digital prints have been extracted from the original negatives, and it is shown for the first time in Spain, curated by Tomo Kosuga and Lorenzo Torres.
When Yoko left him in 1975, the photographer fell into a depression that he tried to alleviate with alcohol. During those days he would begin to photograph those dark creatures that perched on the power lines near the station, where he took the train back to his residence in Hokkaido. Those birds, normally associated with meanings loaded with superstition and bad omens, which in Japanese culture herald turbulent times, were transformed into symbols of lost love under the author’s gaze. Grainy, dark and impressionistic images, in whose blur the existential emptiness is reflected. “The darkness in his aesthetic not only reflects his somber mood, but also a fondness for traditional Japanese culture, especially Zen culture,” notes the curator. The duality between life and death is reflected in the shadowy flight of the crows and in the desolate cawing that the viewer thinks they hear. But it is not just birds that are the inhabitants of this dramatic journey. We will find mysterious walkers, cats, fish, also girls in uniform whose hair flutters in the wind like the wild flapping of a bird captured by its own demons.
Like in The Raven, Edgar Allan Poe’s poem, the raven—“wanderer in the darkness,” as the American author called it—visits the afflicted lover on his descent into madness to remind him of his beloved, and repeat: “Never again.” However, the photographer continued photographing crows until he remarried in 1982. At the end of the series, he would even go so far as to claim that he had turned into a crow. It seems that, just before the accident he suffered in 1992—he fell down a staircase in a bar—there was an intention on the part of the photographer to combine images of him with fragments of the poem. It could not be. Fukase went into a coma for twenty years, from which he never came out. He died on June 9, 2012.
‘Yoko, from Window‘. Masahisa Fukase. Getxophoto. Ereaga Igogailua-Elevator. Getxo. Bizkaia. Until June 30th.
‘Ravens, 烏’. Masahisa Fukase. Minerva Room. Circle of Fine Arts. Madrid PHotoEspaña. Until 8 September.
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