Masahisa Fukase

Born in 1934 on the island of Hokkaido, in northern Japan, into a family of studio photographers, Masahisa Fukase should have taken over his parents' business but, after studying photography, he began a career as a freelance reporter. launched at the end of the 1960s. First for magazines and in the field of advertising, before embarking on a more intimate work. It was in 1971 that he published his first album of photographs, devoted to his family, through group portraits. In 1974, he co-founded the Workshop Photography School with Shomei Tomatsu, Eikoh Hosoe, Noriaki Yokosuka, Nobuyoshi Araki and Daido Moriyama. The New York MoMa dedicates a landmark exhibition to them that same year: “New Japanese Photography”. But it is the book The Solitude of Ravens, released in 1986, which will reveal Fukase with these hallucinating and hallucinating images of crows, work undertaken following his divorce from Yoko, his second wife. “I am becoming a raven”, even wrote its author, about this famous series in the history of photography. Victim in 1992 of a fall on the stairs of his favorite bar and fell into a coma, 58-year-old Masahisa Fukase will be kept in intensive care until his death in 2012.