Tag Archives: intimate portraits

correspondences

by stacy platt | 3 Comments

so it’s more of a visual thing than a lengthy-esoteric-discussion thing, but i’ve been most intrigued by the effect that the institute of design (and, more precisely, its golden-era mentors) have had on the aesthetics of early post-war japanese photographers. i know that yasuhiro ishimoto was studying with siskind and callahan during the heyday, and took his artistic armory back with him to japan, but i’ve just loved looking at the following homages made in respectful nods to callahan by nobuyoshi araki and masahisa fukase (i was certain there was a furuya one, but i think i was just hoping it existed):

the original:

eleanor, chicago, 1949

and those who wish to treat the matter through their own filters:

yoko araki, undated

yoko fukase, izu, 1973

in the introductory essay to anne wilkes tucker’s encylopedic tome the history of japanese photography, the author asserts that araki and fukase both became known to the japanese because they were the first to show the “intimate homelife and personal emotional state of their subjects.” as i read more and more about the environment from which contemporary japanese photographers emerged, i see (though as a westerner cannot fully comprehend) more and more how this work must have come as a shock to the viewing public. i also can’t help but meditate upon how, in absorbing eastern men reinterpret the tones of callahan’s portrait of his wife, they show something else of themselves, of the woman in front of them, and of east contemplating west. it’s amazing and a little humbling to consider just how revolutionary something so simple as an unguarded moment of one’s wife, captured on film, could revolutionize how an entire generation of photographers began to see, and it’s something i’ve loved thinking about ever since i came across these photographs.

The Art of Losing Love, pt.2: Seiichi Furuya and Christine Gössler

by stacy platt | 8 Comments

To demand the portrait that will be a complete portrait of any person is as futile as to demand that a motion picture be condensed into a single still.–Alfred Stieglitz
The other person is absent as a point of reference but present as an addressee. This strangely warped situation causes an unbearable presence: You are gone (which I lament); you are here (because I am turning to you).–Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse.
The more one blows on a fire trying to put it out, the larger the flame becomes.
One stops blowing. The cold blue of the flame changes to a soft red.
Why is that I tried to extinguish that warm, gentle fire?–Seiichi Furuya, 1996

I wanted to write something about love and madness. About what it is to love when the futility of its expression is felt omnipresently, and how one’s ability to pour love into one so stricken mirrors the futility of love itself. The lover will always find a way to empty love from themselves and into the beloved, and the beloved will always take and take and take.

Is it compassion for something we are powerless to affect that drives love into futile places?

Is it a recognition of our collective vulnerability, a karmic reflection back to us that if we were to be so stricken, there would be someone there to love us unconditionally, to worry over us properly?

Is it just an emotional impulse to try and fix something that is broken?

(Or is it all of these things and more, and words further trying to articulate only mess it up further?)

The phrase stultiferous navis emerged in the middle ages when towns, confronted with a mad contingent, did not know what to make or do with them. Were they senseless and harmless, non-contributing members of society, or were they “touched” by god, therefore to be feared and/or awed? Hedging their bets, the townsmen would collect those so “touched” and load them onto boats that would leave their shores, unmanned. If god wanted them, then he would guide them to safe shores. The townspeople could view themselves as merciful, in that that they did not murder them directly.

Later the mad were isolated, and put into the space of former leper colonies, on the tops of hills–where their screams could not be heard, so distanced from the populous.

Their madness came to be viewed as a moral flaw, a willfulness of spirit that could be driven out by hard work and good examples. The institutions of Tuke and Pinel in the 18th and 19th centuries reflected back these beliefs.

Now, in the 21st century, we think we know that so-called-madness is chemical. We scoff at the notion of humoral pathology, wandering wombs and inherent moral flaws. We know that neurons misfire, that parts of the brain don’t receive enough serotonin, that we can mix together cocktails of things and with enough tinkering, nearly anyone can be made “well.”

Seiichi Furuya was a man haunted by an emotionally deficient past. his younger brother was left permanently mentally ill due to a childhood fever, and institutionalized for life. One night he was pinned under the chassis of a car because of the drunk driving of his father. He moved away from his native japan and settled in Austria, where he met the woman who would become his wife, Christine Gössler.

Christine had been through emotionally trying times as well. The year prior, her betrothed had called off their engagement, and she had plunged into a suicidal depression. In an effort to extricate herself, she had slit both her wrists and her neck, the reasons behind which she did not tell Furuya until years later.

Two wounded and circumspect found one another and buoyed each other’s spirits. Furuya began photographing her immediately, she became the center of his eye, and of his “I.”

If you consider the taking of photographs to be in a sense a matter of fixing time and space, then this work–the documenting of the life of one human being–is exceptionally thrilling…in facing her, in photographing her, and looking at her in photographs, I also see and discover “myself.”–seiichi furuya, 1979

The above words were written for the catalog of a show Furuya had exhibiting the images he had made of Christine over the first year they had known one another. later, of this same writing, he added:

…Rereading the translation again and again I feel uncomfortable, I find it somewhat difficult to believe that it is something I myself wrote. Since my proficiency in German at that time did not allow me to write it properly, Christine, herself the subject of the essay, corrected it for me, and this is probably the source of my irritation. Or perhaps it is due to the eighteen years that have passed.

His tone is cynical, like someone who has been overextended and who has fulfilled far too many uncomfortable requests.

Seiichi Furuya and Christine Gössler would soon marry, and they would later have a child, Komyo. Throughout their seven years together, Christine would plunge in and out of depressions and psychiatric institutions. And one Sunday in October of 1985, she would jump to her death from the 9th floor of their apartment building in East Berlin. Furuya photographed her throughout, to the very end. And this faithful and macabre portrait making would become his artistic and philosophical project.

Is death the manner through which others love?

I do not understand those for whom suicide and death is a great seducer…

What is it to be guided by a death-impulse (wish fulfillment) throughout one’s life, and what is it to be one in close proximity to it?

In an essay to the exhibition catalog of A Model Wife, Arthur Ollman writes:

She occupies the center of most of the pictures. Slowly and intermittently, over time, her intensity, seriousness, and depression emerge. The pictures, even the most pained, are shot intimately and at close range. Furuya’s distance to his subject is the physical distance of trusted family. This, then, becomes our viewing distance as well, and often it seems too close.
 
 

What if you believe that the greatest thing you can know–that can be known–is precisely what you cannot–that which is alien and final and unknowable–death itself?

How does one who loves someone else who is intoxicated–obsessed–with the idea of of their own death–how is that imbalance of drives and values ever reconciled? Do we pity the one who dies or the one left with loss (the one who was always left with loss–even when in the presence of the loved one–loss is ever present)?

Some time past noon on October 7, while she was supposed to be preparing lunch, Christine disappeared. While the parade commemorating the thirty-sixth anniversary of the founding of East Germany was being broadcast, and which I was taking photographs of while also watching after Komyo, I had a bad premonition. I hurried down the hall to the bedroom facing the living room but did not find her. The door to the flat was half open.
 
Running out of our fourth floor flat, I immediately headed for the ninth floor. As I was running up the stairs I heard a dull thud. It sounded like a bag of cement hitting the ground.
 
The ninth floor was inaccessible from outside, but there was a connecting passageway which enabled one to come and go between the neighboring residences…one time, muttering to herself, and perhaps making an appeal to me in a moment of crisis, she had said, “If you jumped from here, you’d definitely die, wouldn’t you?” I couldn’t help but recall that scene, and the sound I had just heard a moment before, when I discovered a familiar pair of rubber sandals at the flung open window.
 
“Ko-chan. Mama ist tot.”
“Papa, has du mama gettet?”
“Ja.”
 
There is no way of knowing whether Komyo remembers that conversation. To this day I have regretted saying, “I killed her.”–Christine Furuya-Gössler Memoires, 1978-1985
 
 
…One after the other the images–one of the day we flew to Japan; of our wedding ceremony in Izu; of her ecstatically smiling face when she drew the best fortune at Izumotaisha shrine–appear and disappear. As I rapidly retrace the past, my memory becomes confused and fatigued and starting to blame myself, I gradually return to myself…by blaming myself i can find absolution. My awareness of my need to save myself probably comes from this idea.

I first came to Seiichi Furuya through his most famous image, the contact sheet that shows his wife’s suicide, or more precisely, shows him showing us his wife’s suicide. And then coming to him through all the questions which follow such a fantastically passive event. Is it mediation? Astonishment? A need to rely on something normal or everyday in order to understand, or assimilate, something unfathomable and out of time? Stop time in order to stop life from happening at that very moment?

And then there is this question: what is he trying to get at in exhibiting these final contact sheets? In mediating that moment amongst the others, mixing frames, choosing one version over another–what does an educated eye do when it looks at a contact sheet if not the most automatic of all things: it edits.

I have been reluctant to post on this photographer since I first knew I wanted to write about him. Because to write is to reflect, to know yourself through that which you ingest and infer, and the issues at hand in Furuya’s pscyho-biography and his philosophical boundary conditions are delicate and emotional ones. It is not that his photographs are the most artfully seen, or those most representative of an era’s way of seeing. It is that his photographs are both an image of a wound and its excision, that they are a compulsive need to live with and to exorcise the presence of something the photographer does not understand, cannot ultimately help to cure and is utterly terrified of living without. What would occur were Furuya to burn his hundreds of pictures of Christine, his thousands of negatives? Would he feel release or would it be unrecoverable loss? What does it mean to tie your identity as an artist to a memento mori project on your dead wife? What if all you have to hold on to memory and feeling is your connection to this loss, this absence and lack, and to divest yourself of it is a kind of personal heresy?

What I find myself most drawn to in my investigation of love, loss, Japanese photographers and eastern aesthetics in general is that the work often asks more questions than it answers. That there are fewer initial biases or prejudices to confirm, and that you as the viewer are often in the same uncomfortable, unknowable space as the photographer, and further: that there are no apologies tendered for the questions which fall in empty air, or the discomfort felt between the book and your hands, or the image on the gallery wall and the place between you and it.

The Art of Losing Love, pt.1 : Words on Masahisa Fukase

by stacy platt | 13 Comments

It must be difficult to live with a photographer.

First, you must think you’re eternally being spied upon, trying to be caught unawares, that an eye waiting to catch the true-true-you is always present, and always watching. It is only later that you realize that it isn’t your essence that the photographer is trying to capture and distill truth from, it’s theirs. That each image pointed at you is really just a sublimated view of themselves, and that what they project when they point and click in your general direction is really just a reflection back of self, sometimes twisted and sometimes upside-down.

So it’s a perverse kind of attention: they look at you to get a better look at themselves. Didn’t you know that an essential piece of the camera is the mirror installed inside the casing?

Are all photographs made by photographers of those they love just a kind of extended visual autobiography? How much does our conception of the world hinge on how we love? Does the dynamic of our chosen relationship(s) begin to define our aesthetic, at least in relation to how we visualize it? And how do we choose partners? Do we choose one that keeps us in check by having a world view that complements (does not mean that it is the same as ours) our own? Do we choose one that will tear ours down, or constantly challenge it? Or do we choose one that we can only grasp for a little while, knowing that love and life (and photography, too) are ephemeral and fleeting?

I’ve been thinking about photographers in love, and the photographs they make while in that state. And also its shadow-twin: same photographer, making something out of a place of loss from that love. What is it to make a memory out of loss? To distill the precise ache of mourning? In photographs that become about loss‚ did the losing already happen before the photo? Did it happen in the course of it? Is the photo then a document of loss? Are these then the most documentary of all documentary images?

Masahisa Fukase’s best known work was made while reeling from loss of love. After thirteen years of marriage, his wife Yoko left him. While on a train returning to his hometown of Hokkaido, perhaps feeling unlucky and ominous, Fukase got off at stops and began to photograph something which in his culture and in others represents inauspicious feeling: ravens. He became obsessed with them, with their darkness and loneliness. His photographs capture them mid-flight; crouched in trees at dusk with glowing eyes; and singularly and spectacularly depressingly dead, in cold deep snow. In the forward to the book published of this work, Akira Hasegawa writes, “Masahisa Fukase’s work can be deemed to have reached its supreme height; it can also be said to have fallen to its greatest depth. The solitude revealed in this collection of images is sometimes so painful that we want to avert our eyes from it.”

I have posted a few images of this body of work in other posts, and there are others available in other places, but below are a few images taken of what was his primary subject before the ravens, what can be said led directly to his more famous work of ravens: pictures of his wife Yoko:

Sarobetsu, Hokkaido, 1971

New York, 1974

Mastsubara Apartment, 1968

The body of photographs I’ve seen of Yoko show a multiplicity of moods, filled with both surface and subverted meaning. there are playful, joyous photographs, such as the first one above; 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.

Yoko has said of that time that it was punctuated by, “…suffocating dullness, interspersed by violent and near suicidal flashes of excitement.” In a move meant to author more control over her own life, she left him in 1976. Fukase spiraled into a profound depression, made the work with the ravens over a period of years, remarried, divorced, and then in the summer of 1992, when descending a staircase at a bar he frequented, he fell. The fall was severe and caused considerable brain damage, and Fukase lives the next and the rest of his continued days in an institution, where he has no sense of photography, photographic history, or his place in it. Yoko, now remarried, visits him twice a month. She has said, “with a camera in front of his eye, he could see, not without. He remains a part of my identity, that’s why I still visit him.”

When I read about Fukase’s fate last week I was stymied. Struck with the realization that a photographer with such clear, articulated and felt vision was prematurely taken, and that whatever else he might have had to say was taken away not only from himself but the rest of the world to experience through him; then the aftershock that it is not the finality of death that has taken that away, but the murkier waters of the mind which has receded his thoughts and inclinations from both himself and anyone else. Fukase has no clue who the Fukase was before that made those photographs, or why, or what can be gained in the making. He has no care that an entire lifetime happened before he is where he is now; and further, given how tortured he was over the loss of Yoko (even despite the remarriage he reportedly never stopped mourning her), the now obliviated mind might be a kind of gift, a reprieve from too much knowing, too much sight.