Masahisa Fukase

The Portrait Studio and Commercial Photography—Where Staging and Repetition Began

Fukase was born into a portrait studio in Bifuka, Hokkaido. He assisted with darkroom work from childhood and studied photography with the expectation that he would become the studio’s third-generation proprietor. After university he remained in Tokyo and worked in commercial photography for Daiichi Senden-sha, the Japan Design Center, and other firms. He later said that he had never practiced any other form of expression because he had grown up in a photographic studio^*2. A portrait studio arranges people within a controlled space and brings a family into the order of a single frame. Commercial work combines objects, color, and bodies in anticipation of the printed result. In Amanda Maddox’s account of Kōtarō Iizawa’s interpretation, Fukase’s images are built on the combination and interaction of disparate elements, supported by compositional skills developed in commercial photography^*2. The fixed viewpoints, instructions to models, collage, intense color, and repeated sessions of his later work retain the techniques of staging learned through the family business and advertising.

Kill the Pig—Placing Private Life and Slaughterhouse Death in the Same Exhibition

The 1961 exhibition Kill the Pig shows that Fukase combined social sites with his own life from the beginning of his career. Photographs made at the Shibaura slaughterhouse appeared alongside images of his partner’s pregnant body and the stillborn child they had lost. Foam presents the work as an early conjunction of life and death, affection and grief, playfulness and brutality^*3. Its provocative title and collision of incompatible images refuse to organize loss into a private tragedy. They draw the viewer into a space where unease and black humor coexist. His later photographs of his wife, family, father, cats, and his own body likewise place intimacy beside the images that remain after relationships break or people disappear.

The 1976 Shashin Urimasu (“Photographs for Sale”) Exhibition—Could Photographers Become Independent of Magazines?

When Fukase began working in the 1960s, Japanese photography circulated primarily through magazines such as Camera Mainichi and Asahi Camera. Editors selected the work, which passed through the printing process before circulating in large numbers; photographic prints often functioned as intermediate materials for the page. In 1974 Fukase joined Shōmei Tōmatsu, Eikoh Hosoe, Daidō Moriyama, Nobuyoshi Araki, and others at the WORKSHOP School of Photography. The 1976 Shashin Urimasu (“Photographs for Sale”) exhibition asked whether photographers could control the production, display, and price of their own prints. WORKSHOP sought to reduce dependence on magazine editors and commercial assignments by creating venues and income for photographers. Takuma Nakahira and others criticized the attempt to give photography, a reproducible technology, the value of an “original” and to frame and sell it like painting^*4. The dispute gave Fukase a concrete question: how much could the photographer’s manual labor establish the work’s identity? It formed an institutional background for the printing of Ravens and for the color, fingerprints, and stitching of his later work.

“To Photograph Is to Steal”—Questioning Objectivity and Exposing the Photographer’s Intervention

Fukase repeatedly left evidence of himself in his photographs because he did not regard photography as an objective record. In the early 1970s, Takuma Nakahira and others challenged the premise that photographs could record reality neutrally^*4. Fukase wrote in 1969 that simply photographing an object did not mean it had been grasped. He wanted the act of looking through the finder to become part of his body and to engage the subject with his own presence included^*12. He later wrote that “everything photographed is a reflection of oneself” and described photography as toru wa nusumu—“to photograph is to steal”—because it carried the guilt and pleasure of pickpocketing^*2. Camera distance, instructions to a model, darkroom work, and the hands, feet, and fingerprints that enter the image disclose where the photographer stood, what he asked of another person, and which image he claimed as his work. Masato Seto recalled Fukase speaking enthusiastically about the fine utility wires that continued uninterrupted across a pale sky in Lee Friedlander’s photographs^*9. The memory suggests an interest in accidental elements that enter the frame and become part of its structure.

Yoko—When the Camera Entered a Marriage

In Yoko, the camera altered the routines and roles of a marriage. For Untitled (From Window) in 1973, Fukase stood at a fourth-floor window at about nine each morning while Yoko appeared on the street below, repeating the exchange through a telephoto lens. Fukase decided that he would photograph her for a year regardless of the result^*2. Yoko answered with jumps, turns, umbrellas, bags, and other gestures, actively participating in the making of each image. Fukase set the time, position, and duration; Yoko transformed the rule through performance each morning. The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum notes that the couple eventually faced the paradox of seeming to remain together in order to make photographs^*1. Yoko also wrote that the photographs ostensibly depicting her revealed Fukase himself. The 1999 exhibition catalogue The Model Wife includes both Lee Friedlander and Fukase among photographers who photographed their spouses over long periods^*8. Friedlander accumulated images of his wife and family within the flow of everyday life. Fukase made the window and street, the morning hour, and the gestures requested of Yoko into rules for production. Yoko records intimacy as a source of collaboration while preserving the imbalance between the person who sets the conditions and the person who responds.

Family and Father’s Memory—Recording Jokes and Endings in the Family Studio

Family and Father’s Memory address the family business Fukase did not inherit and the gradual aging and disappearance of his relatives within the same studio. For roughly twenty years beginning in 1971, he gathered relatives at the Bifuka studio and used a large-format camera to repeat a frontal composition while changing clothing, placement, and participants. Fukase called the work a “parody” made by someone who had failed to become the third-generation proprietor of the Fukase studio^*2. Yoko’s nudity, hired models from outside the family, and the fundoshi worn by Fukase and his father introduce jokes and bawdiness into the decorum of the family portrait. As the sessions continued, marriages, births, aging, his father’s death, and the studio’s closure appeared as differences within the same composition. Deceased relatives returned as memorial portraits. Tomo Kosuga, writing for Aperture, places Family, with its commemorative group portraits, alongside Father’s Memory, which follows Fukase’s father from life through death and cremation^*13. His father Sukezō was both a parent and a professional predecessor who had run the studio. By photographing his weakening body and the end of the family business, Fukase occupied several positions within the same series: director of the family scene, son within the family, and heir who had declined the inheritance. The Barbican reads the placement of half-naked women at the edge of the frame as outsiders as evidence of familial hierarchy and male privilege^*14. The fixed studio gave Fukase a consistent measure for recording family jokes, absences, and changes in his own position.

Ravens—Constructing a First Person without Showing the Self

Ravens constructs a first person through recurring motifs, darkroom tonality, and photographic sequence without directly showing the artist’s face or the events of his daily life. In 1976, as his creative relationship with Yoko ended, Fukase traveled to Hokkaido and began photographing ravens within the landscape of his return home. After the first exhibition, shaped by advice from Shōji Yamagishi, he concentrated more deliberately on the birds and continued the series in Hokkaido, Kanazawa, and Tokyo^*1. At the time, Fukase linked a wish to stop the world with photography as “a revenge drama against being alive.” He later recalled that as the work continued, his interest in the birds receded until he himself became a raven^*7. Philip Charrier analyzes the series as an intersection of self-representation, narrative, and metaphor^*6. While contemporary I-photography developed direct arrangements of wives, homes, dates, and everyday events, Fukase assigned the first person to bird forms, snow, travel, blur, and black-and-white tonalities. Through pursuit and editing, the raven connected the time of homecoming, separation, and isolation. This construction of autobiographical photography without the author’s face gives the series its formal necessity and its place in photography history.

Sasuke—Recording the Photographer’s Body through a Cat’s Movement

In Sasuke, Fukase’s “self-portrait” consists both of the cat and of his own body while pursuing it with the camera. He lay on the floor at the cat’s eye level and adjusted himself to its running, jumping, sleeping, and open-mouthed movements. After photographing from that low viewpoint for more than a year, he wrote that he too had become a cat and described the images of Sasuke and Momoe as a “self-portrait”^*2. The low viewpoint, excessive proximity, and movement-following frame register the photographer’s body crouching, chasing, and waiting behind the camera. The cats’ wide-open mouths and sudden actions also introduce a comedy that resists complete control by Fukase’s intention. The first Sasuke disappeared soon after arriving in the household, and Fukase posted roughly one hundred notices around the neighborhood. He later adopted a similar-looking cat, named it “Sasuke II,” and continued photographing^*15. The word “self-portrait” therefore joins two acts: aligning his body with the animal’s movement and carrying a relationship with a lost creature into another cat and the next photograph.

Private Scenes and Bukubuku—Using the Camera as Part of the Body

From 1989 onward, Fukase began placing his own hands, feet, and face in front of landscapes in Private Scenes. He explained that he chose the title because everything photographed was a reflection of himself. He was interested in viewing the body from a distance close enough to touch, a perspective unavailable when a self-timer placed the camera far away^*2. For Bukubuku, he brought an underwater camera close to his face and made dated self-portraits almost every day for more than a month. The surface of the water, bubbles, distorted face, and camera share the same tight space; the lens, water, breath, and position of the hand alter the face in every exposure^*2. Lee Friedlander’s Self Portrait incorporated the photographer into urban compositions as shadow or reflection. Fukase kept the camera within arm’s reach and examined face, skin, hand, and breath themselves^*10. No direct line of influence has been established, yet the comparison clarifies that Fukase’s self-portraits test the physical body operating the camera as much as they offer symbols of an inner self.

Berobero—When Viewer and Viewed Share the Same Contact

In Berobero, made from 1990 to 1992, Fukase touched tongues with friends and strangers he met in Shinjuku bars and elsewhere, photographing the encounter at arm’s length. The participants span genders and ages; their laughter, closed eyes, and degrees of surrender remain visible in the frame^*16. In a conversation with Miyako Ishiuchi, Fukase compared seeing and being seen to the two ends of touching tongues. Holding the camera, he entered the same contact as the other person and exposed his own face and tongue. The bawdy, comic act briefly collapses the distance between photographer and subject and turns the one who looks into someone seen. The window and street that separated the two figures in Yoko contract here into a single point of contact. The series turns photography into an event involving play, embarrassment, and physical risk alongside serious self-examination.

Repeated Photography—Recording Changes in a Relationship as Time

Fukase’s major series share a method of imposing a condition on himself and returning to the same subject. He photographed Yoko each morning, rearranged his family in the Bifuka studio, returned to Hokkaido in pursuit of ravens, worked for a year at a cat’s eye level, and continued dated self-portraits in a bathtub. Maddox argues that Fukase’s everyday life showed a strong attraction to routine, which became a repeated ritual in his photography^*2. Fixed conditions accumulate differences in gesture, number, age, response, and expression. They also reveal the photographer’s own obsession and fatigue. Repetition allowed him to record changes in a relationship as time—changes that no single photograph could easily contain.

The Photobook Ravens—How Repeated Bird Forms Create a First Person

The Ravens series appeared intermittently in Camera Mainichi from 1976 to 1982 and passed through several exhibitions before becoming the 1986 photobook Ravens. Editing reorganized photographs made at different times and places into a single duration for the reader. Philip Charrier examines the series as an overlap of self-expression, narrative, and metaphor, challenging readings that reduce it to a symbol of post-divorce tragedy^*6. Ravens appear alone, in flocks, as blurred forms, and in distant views, joining photographs made across different journeys, weather conditions, and camera distances. Without an explicit chronology or extended confession, repeated bird forms and page order recast homecoming, separation, and isolation as first-person time. Editor Michitaka Ota has said that the design drew on the first edition of Stephen Shore’s Uncommon Places and self-published books by Friedlander^*11. Friedlander’s self-publication of Self Portrait, which gave a body of work a durable form through fixed page order, also served as a reference. The result established a photobook with an integrity independent of its magazine serialization^*10.

The Original Print—Leaving the Author’s Hand on a Reproducible Medium

Fukase printed Ravens himself, showing 24-by-30-centimeter prints at the early Nikon Salon exhibitions and larger prints in the 1979 ICP exhibition Japan: A Self-Portrait. Late in his career, he experimented with prints of Ravens and Father’s Memory nearly two meters high. In his Polaroid works, he cut, stitched, and pierced photographs with thumbtacks before rephotographing them. Fukase explained that he needed to print his own work, despite his lack of confidence in the craft, because he sought originality, individuality, a sense of himself, and the feel of something handmade^*4. Paper size, black-and-white tonality, seams, and holes attest that the photographer assumed responsibility for a final form not determined by the negative alone. Fukase tested the authorship contested in 1976 through the surface of the print and its occupation of exhibition space.

Hibi and Private Scenes ’92—Working on the Surfaces of the City and the Print

Hibi photographs worn road markings, fading arrows, and cracks in asphalt, then overlays the monochrome prints with vivid ink. MACK explains that Fukase’s color enters surfaces worn down by countless urban inhabitants, leaving a physical trace of the artist on each print^*17. Anonymous passage accumulated on the street and the movement of Fukase’s hand after exposure meet on the same sheet of paper. In his final solo exhibition, Private Scenes ’92, he painted on small photographs, stamped them with red fingerprints, pinned them densely across the wall, and placed some on the floor. Voyau argues that in this final phase Fukase critically reworked the system of exhibition and original prints that he had promoted in the 1970s^*4. The fingerprint became an authorial signature, while rough color and photographs scattered on the floor unsettled the orderly preservation and sale of art objects. Fukase asserted the author’s hand and simultaneously disturbed the idea that this hand could guarantee the work’s authority.

Masahisa Fukase and I-Photography—Is the “I” a Subject or a Position behind the Camera?

Fukase is now frequently presented as a leading figure in the I-photography of the 1970s. The term, related to the Japanese I-novel, has been applied to photographs that treat an author’s life and experience in the first person; it became widely known through Nobuyoshi Araki’s Sentimental Journey^*4. Maddox cautions that no record has been found of Fukase describing his own work as I-photography^*2. Araki gathered dates, his wife, travel, and domestic life directly under the author’s name. Fukase constructed a first person through ravens, cats, the conventions of the family portrait, darkroom work, photobook sequencing, and the print surface. Voyau argues that Fukase’s “I” included the position of the photographer as author—the maker who produces, signs, and sells the work—as well as private life as subject matter^*4. Fukase’s I-photography places personal confession and the author’s acts of photographing and editing within the same form.

How Overseas Exhibitions Framed Fukase—Changing Families and the Form of the Print

Overseas exhibitions gave Fukase’s work different critical frames. In MoMA’s 1974 exhibition New Japanese Photography, Yoko was presented as a response to changes in family life and everyday experience in postwar Japan. The press release quoted Shōji Yamagishi’s description of a generation confronting the collapse of the traditional family system and the deterioration of the human environment, positioning Fukase as an artist who used his own life as material^*5. At ICP’s 1979 exhibition Japan: A Self-Portrait, the enlarged Ravens prints drew attention. Nobuyoshi Araki linked their reception to scale and, with Shōmei Tōmatsu, described the work as “formalism”^*4. MoMA foregrounded private life and social change; ICP brought out black-and-white tonality, scale, and the effect of the print on the wall. Fukase’s early overseas reception therefore supported several readings at once: a photographer of postwar Japanese life, an artist working through self-representation, and an experimenter with the form of the print.

The Ethics of Photography in Yoko’s Words

Fukase wrote that photography carried guilt and a pleasure resembling theft. Late in life, he reflected that he had drawn the people he loved into his photography and had made no one—including himself—happy^*2. Yoko likewise wrote that she had spent ten years under his gaze through the lens and that what appeared in the photographs was Fukase himself. Their words make it difficult to read Yoko solely as loving collaboration or solely as unilateral control. Jumps and costumes, nudity and fundoshi in the family portraits, cats’ mouths, and the contact of Berobero contain pleasure, practical jokes, and embarrassment. The same photographic process could also produce exhaustion and separation, leaving only the image. Foam’s 2018 retrospective widened an overseas recognition centered on Ravens to include Play, Family, Sasuke, Walking Eye, Private Scenes, and Bukubuku^*3. The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum’s 2023 exhibition organized work from 1961 to 1991 into thirteen themes^*1. These retrospectives have reframed Fukase’s photography through the photographer’s intervention, the asymmetries of intimate relationships, and manual work on the print, while also restoring play and chance as forces that shape the work.