"KILL THE PIG" by Masahisa Fukase

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This is a collection of the unknown first works of the eccentric photographer Masahisa Fukase, who was active as one of the most radical and experimental photographers representing postwar Japan through such masterpieces as "Crow" and "Family," but who suddenly ceased his activities at the height of his career.

At the 1961 Tokyo photo exhibition "Kill the Pig," Fukase presented two works, "Kill the Pig" and "Ra." The former, which gave the exhibition its name, was a photograph of livestock at a slaughterhouse in Shibaura. Meanwhile, the two people performing naked in "Ra," which means naked, were none other than Fukase himself and his partner at the time. These two different subjects were presented in such a way that they divided the exhibition hall in two, but in the center of the hall, which could be called the junction, a particularly heterogeneous motif was mixed together. It was a baby, finished in a high-contrast tone that was almost a silhouette. The child was born to the couple, but was unfortunately stillborn. Fukase prepared the photograph as a negative and a positive image, inverted in black and white, and exhibited them side by side.

According to Yamagishi Shoji, an editor who supported Fukase from the very beginning of his career, "Whether the motivation was love or frustration, I wanted to confirm the meaning of 'me' taking photographs." If Fukase was to confirm that very "meaning," he exposed his beloved lover and his undivided girlfriend once again in front of the camera, and chose the slaughterhouse as a place where he could face the irrational death... The image of his dead and born child passes through the undivided couple and overlaps with the image of livestock destined to be slaughtered. This work, Fukase's debut work, shows the layered nature of existence through a complex combination of straight photographs, and presents the paradox of life and death through this relationship diagram.

Tomo Kosuga (Director of the Masahisa Fukase Archives)

Product Information

release date

Part number2526200719705

Specification Hardcover in a slipcase
84 pages
245 x 325 mm
limited edition of 1,000 copies
2021

winner of The Best Dutch Book Designs of 2021
Published by IBASHO

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