Masahisa Fukase

Born in 1934 on the island of Hokkaido, in the north of Japan, into a family of studio photographers, Masahisa Fukase was meant to take over the business, but after studying photography in Tokyo, he launched a career as a freelance reporter in the late 1960s. He initially worked for magazines and in the advertising field, but later began more personal work. It was in 1971 that he published his first photography book, dedicated to his family, through group portraits. In 1974, he cofounded the Workshop Photography School with Shomei Tomatsu, Eikoh Hosoe, Noriaki Yokosuka, Nobuyoshi Araki, and Daido Moriyama and that same year, the MoMA in New York dedicated a milestone exhibition to them: New Japanese Photography. But it was the 1986 book The Solitude of Ravens that was to reveal Fukase, featuring his wild and incredible images of ravens, work undertaken after his divorce from Yoko, his second wife. “I become a raven” the author even wrote of this series that was to become a landmark in the history of photography.

Victim in 1992 of a fall in the stairway of his favourite bar, Masahisa Fukase went into a coma at the age of 58 and was maintained on life support until his death in 2012.

Private Scenes (2023) is the artist's third publication at Atelier EXB after the monograph on his entire body of work, Masahisa Fukase, published in 2018 and Sasuke, bringing together the photographs of his cats, published in 2021.

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