Masahisa Fukase

Masahisa Fukase - Bloody pigs and naked self-portraits

Masahisa Fukase was born on 25th February 1934 in the small town of Bifuka in the north of Hokkaidō. He was literally born into photography, as his parents ran a photography studio with some success, where Masahisa Fukase learnt the basics of the photographic craft at an early age. In the 1950s, he went to Tokyo to study photography at the renowned Nihon University, graduated in 1956, and then worked for a short time at the Nippon Design Centre and at Kawada Shobo Shinsha Publishers before becoming a freelance photographer in 1968. By this time, Masahisa Fukase had already presented his first major artistic project, the work group Kill the Pig from 1961, which showed gloomy images of the bloody events at the Shibaura slaughterhouse in Tokyo. The series Naked, in the exhibition of the same name, showed nudes of the photographer himself and his partner at the time, Yukiyo Kawakami – a direct juxtaposition and sharp contrast.

International breakthrough with melancholic raven pictures

Masahisa Fukase is best known today for his photographs of ravens. The series Karasu (The Ravens) was created between 1976 and 1982 and originally titled Tonpokuki (Winter Diary). The atmospheric black and white images of ravens in Hokkaidō, Kanazawa and Tokyo initially appeared as an eight-part series in the magazine Camera Mainichi, but were also shown at exhibitions, which brought the artist great recognition not only in Japan, but also in Europe and the USA. The publication of the photographs in 1986 quickly became one of the most sought-after Japanese illustrated books of the post-war period and had a lasting impact on the artist's image. Masahisa Fukase had already declared somewhat cryptically at the end of the project in 1982 that he himself had become a raven. Although the raven paintings became by far Fukase's most famous work, they only make up a fraction of his extensive oeuvre. Characterised by working in series, sometimes spanning several decades, his pictures often depicted personal motifs and gave an insight into the artist's soul: pictures of his wife, shots of his dying father, and Sasuke, Fukase's cat.

Unable to work after a serious fall

Despite his successful career in Tokyo, Masahisa Fukase remained closely connected to his homeland throughout his life, and during the 1970s and 1980s, he frequently visited his family to take portraits of them with his camera. The resulting images were published in the photo book Kazoku (Family), which is considered the rarest of Masahisa Fukase’s books and is a coveted collector's item. In 1992, the artist had a serious fall while visiting his favourite bar and suffered a brain injury that made it impossible for him to continue his work. As a result, a large part of his work remained hidden from the public, and it was only after his death that the archives were made accessible to the interested art world.

Masahisa Fukase died on 9th June 2012.