Overwhelming, whimsical, sad and affecting: the body of work Masahisa Fukase left behind when he passed away in 2012 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.
Chapters from Fukase’s oeuvre have been diligently pieced together over the past decade courtesy of Tomo Kosuga, the director of the archive, as well as Fukase’s family. And yet it’s still an ongoing project. It was only last year, in the build-up to his overdue retrospective in Tokyo, that missing prints emerged from their dusty hiding places. Among them were 32 works belonging to From Window, a series that was published in various magazines in the 1970s, largely forgotten thereafter but partially resurrected by Simon Baker’s seminal Tate Modern exhibition, Performing for the Camera (2016). Gallerist Michael Hoppen, who calls himself a “fully paid-up member of the Fukase fan club,” has just published the complete set in an elegant, limited-edition volume. “The opportunity was too hard to resist,” he says. “How and why the prints were lost is still a mystery.”
The star of From Window is Yoko Wanibe, to whom Fukase was married between 1964 and 1976. “Yoko appeared in many guises,” notes Hoppen. “This included intimate scenes of their domestic life, subversively staged wedding pictures, a dramatic shoot in an abattoir and even a formal death portrait.” In Japan in the 70s, there was a vogue of photographers publishing intimate photographs of their wives, and even a special 1972 issue of Camera Mainichi dedicated to wives, featuring work by Nobuyoshi Araki, Emmet Gowin and others. While the correlation between personal themes and opposition to authority – from the rise of the hippie movement to underground theatre – laid the groundwork for what came to be referred to as “I-photography”, Hoppen argues that the role Yoko played in Fukase’s photographic development “transcended” the stereotype of the muse.
“By 1973, Fukase and Yoko’s marriage had already experienced significant challenges,” continues Hoppen. “Fukase moved to another flat in Shinjuku and started using alternative models for his projects. 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.”
From Window was the result of that “season of compulsion”. With a resolutely ritualistic approach, Fukase photographed Yoko heading off to work every morning from his fourth-floor window using a telephoto lens. Yoko waves, wails and sticks her tongue out, apparently titillated by the attention of her husband’s lens, imagining how she might look through it. 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. “You could say Fukase was drawing on Yoko’s experience as a trained actress,” says Hoppen. “There’s a kind of performative equilibrium that disturbs the traditionally acknowledged power dynamics between the photographer and model.”
Fukase obsessively photographed the people (and cats) around him, expressions of love which wound up as destructive. As Fukase confessed in 1982, he became plagued by the paradox of “being with others just to photograph them,” resulting in a profound, existential loneliness as his compulsive shooting of those close to him ended up driving them away. “He has only seen me through the lens,” Yoko said bitterly of her snap-happy husband. “I believe that all the photographs of me were unquestionably photographs of himself.”
Do Yoko’s morning commutes somehow presage Fukase’s loss? “I think so,” says Hoppen. “It has been speculated that the experience of shooting his parents’ funerary portraits, anticipating the ritual usage of those pictures after their deaths, inspired Fukase to photograph Yoko from the window. 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.”
Convinced that Fukase was with her solely for the sake of photography, Yoko signed divorce papers in 1976, plunging the photographer into a deep and dark depression. Although a persistent elegiac impulse throbbed throughout Fukase’s practice thereafter, From Window stands as a brilliant and high-spirited tale of one man’s all-consuming love. As for Yoko, she is as bright as ever: off to work, slowly slipping out of Fukase’s grip, belonging – as she does – to no one.
From Window is published by Michael Hoppen Gallery in a limited edition of 120.
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