Masahisa Fukase was born in 1934 in the city of Hokkaido, Japan, the son of a successful local studio photographer. He graduated from the Photography Department of Nihon University College of Art in 1956 and, after brief stints at the Nippon Design Center and Kawade Shobo Shinsha Publishers, became a freelance photographer in 1968.
Since the early 1960s, he has published numerous photographic works, mainly in camera magazines. He has participated in numerous exhibitions around the world, beginning with “New Japanese Photography,” a special exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1974. He has shown his work in numerous exhibitions around the world.
Fukase is considered one of the most radical and experimental photographers of the postwar generation in Japan. He became world-famous for his photographic series and subsequent publication Karasu (Ravens, 1975-1985), which has been widely hailed as a photographic masterpiece. Yet the bulk of his work remained largely inaccessible for more than two decades. A tragic fall in 1992 left the artist with permanent brain damage, and it was only after his death in 2012 that the archives were gradually opened. Since then, a wealth of never-before-seen material has emerged.
Fukase worked almost exclusively in series, some of which were created over the course of several decades. Taken together, they form a remarkable visual biography of one of the most original photographers of his time. Fukase incorporated his own life experiences of loss, love, loneliness, and depression into his work in a surprisingly playful way. His images are personal and deeply intimate: over the years, his wife Yoko, his dying father, and his beloved cat Sasuke have regularly appeared in sometimes comic, sometimes somber visual narratives. Toward the end of his career, the photographer increasingly turned the camera on himself. The large number of performative self-portraits testifies to the artist’s unique, almost obsessive way of relating to his environment and to himself.
Although Fukase has become almost synonymous with his evocative black-and-white Ravens, his buoyant color abstractions, giant Polaroids, and wildly painted selfies reveal the artist’s inexhaustible resourcefulness and versatility. For Fukase, work rarely stopped after a photograph was taken, as evidenced by the experimental ways in which the artist presented his work in print and exhibition throughout his life.
His work has been widely exhibited at institutions such as MoMA, New York, the Oxford Museum of Modern Art, the Foundation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, and the Victoria & Albert Museum. His work is in major collections including the Victoria & Albert Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Getty Museum. He is also the recipient of awards including the 2nd Ina Nobuo Award and the Special Award at the 8th Higashikawa Photography Awards.
He died in 2012 at the age of 78.
