Masahisa Fukase Photo Collection "FAMILY"

About the productJapanese

"Everyone in the family, reflected upside down in the focusing glass, dies. The camera that captures their images is a device that records death." - Masahisa Fukase

In August 1971, Masahisa Fukase and his wife Yoko arrived in Bifuka Town in northern Hokkaido. It was his first visit to his hometown in over a decade. Fukase's family had run a photo studio for three generations, with his younger brother Ryoki taking over as the third generation. Fukase was reunited with the family, which had grown to a large household with his younger brother and sister starting their own families, and decided to gather them in the studio to take a commemorative family photo. However, it was not just a formal family photo. He inserted his wife, half-naked and wearing only a loincloth, into the family.

Fukase continued to take these strange family photographs, incorporating not only his wife but also various other female models. By taking fixed-point photographs, the changes in the family over the years could be precisely ascertained, and the photographs stood as records that told a fragment of the family's history, but at the same time, Fukase's fictional elements were mixed in here and there. As Fukase described the strange family photographs that were created in this way, "a parody of me, a third-generation loser," one of his aims was to satirize the traditional format of family photographs by mixing in elements that are not suitable for family photographs.

Filming around the Fukase family continued for five years before being suspended, but was restarted in 1985 after Fukase's father, Sukezo, appeared elderly. Photographs were taken on the day of his father's funeral two years later, and the series was completed in 1989, on the day Fukase Photo Studio went out of business, i.e. the day the family was dispersed. Although filming began as a light-hearted parody of traditional family photographs, the film was shot over a period of nearly 20 years and has turned into a brutally detailed record of the rise and fall of the family.

This book is a new edition of the photo book "Family" published by Inter Press Corporation in 1991. This was the last book that Fukase produced while he was alive, and now, after more than a quarter century, it has been given a new look and reborn. Family portraits taken at the Fukase Photo Studio are collected in chronological order, and at the end of the book you will find Fukase's autobiography, which was included in the original edition, and a commentary on the work by Tomo Kosuga, founder and director of the Masahisa Fukase Archives.

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Product Information

Publisher MACK

release date 2019

Part numberKPHT10151W-9781912339570

Specification 31.0 x 23.0 cm

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