Yohko. Photographs by Masahisa Fukase. Brief essay by AShoji Yamaguchi (text in English and Japanese). Asahi Sonorama, Japan, 1978. Unpaged. Small quarto. First edition. Hardbound in photo-illustration dust jacket. Black-and-white reproductions.
Fukase is best known for his brooding masterpiece Karasu (Ravens), which was recently hailed as the the best photobook of the last 25 years.
Prior to making the work that became Ravens, Fukase turned his lens on his new wife, Yohko. As Stacey Oborn said on her excellent site, The Space in Between, Fukase's images of Yohko, "show a multiplicity of moods, filled with both surface and subverted meaning. There are playful, joyous photographs....sardonic commentary concerning perception, as in the second (the photo shows yoko dressed in formal kimono, kneeling beneath photographs of herself at the opening of John Szarkowski’s curated show at MOMA in 1974 of new Japanese photography, totally and utterly ignored by the hoi polloi coming to mingle around images made of her by her husband, whom the show, in part, is celebrating); and still there are those posed, mastubara apartment, which for all its premeditation, probably says more about power and projection than even Fukase could have imagined when composing it."
Fine- in Fine- dust jacket; moderate foxing. |
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