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I’ve been exploring Japanese Photography over the past few months. You don’t have to dig very deeply into the subject before you come across the name Masahisa Fukase.

In a sense this is strange. There are no books currently in print. The artist has been in a coma since 1992 and doesn’t seem to have been a great self-publicist whilst active. The images are not world famous poster-and-coaster images. Only one substantial body of work seems to have been published outside of Japan, and although this is available secondhand it is in the breath-deeply price range. Once you’ve seen some of the photos though it becomes less strange. This was one exceptional photographer.

I’ve only seen small reproductions of Fukase’s early work. These show a wit and a charm that, whilst not unique, was distinctive and suggested the possibility of great work to come. There is then a large body of work (with a number of Japanese market books that I’ve not been able to see) about his relationship with his wife. From the pictures that I’ve seen this work borders on the obsessional, but it is full of life. I’ve found this work less interesting.

The conventional belief is that his separation from his wife created his last and greatest work. This is the ‘Ravens’ series from which the English language ‘The Solitude of Ravens’ was drawn. Dark and moody prints about the blackest of birds do suggest a depressed and depressive artist, but how much of this is backwards looking assumption I do not know.

I put the word Ravens in inverted commas because some commentators refer to them as Crows, and, given that a large number of birds appear in several of the photos they might even be Rooks. I don’t know if the confusion is an ornithological one, or a linguistic one.

An essay by Akira Hasegawa suggests that Fukase referred to his own existence after his separation from his wife as ravens because of the solitude. For the photos the exact species of bird does not matter.

But what of the Ravens photos. Why are they so good? To start with, not every photo has a Raven in it (even allowing for the species debate). This is true even after you have spent some time spotting the non-obvious Ravens in some of the pictures. There are Raven references even when there are no Ravens. A girls hair, or a tramps coat. Some other pictures are even less literal. The references are to solitude rather than anything birdlike.

Although not all commentators would agree with me, I find the bird pictures by far the strongest. Ignoring cultural references for a moment, these are glorious pictures of these birds. They are portraits in a way that wildlife photos usually are not. Dark, grainy, under-exposed, blotchy, over magnified photos they may be. But they express the animals and their environment brilliantly. Add the cultural references and these photos will take you into the heart of the artist.

The photos that work best for me are the group shots showing lots of birds. This is why I think the solitude aspect is slightly overdone. The birds in these group shots are social animals and not in solitude at all. These communities have been captured to perfection. The animals are both individuals and a part of a group at the same time; just like they really are.

As I was preparing this post, Rob Gardiner published this review of ‘The Solitude of Ravens’. This probably says more about the rate of expansion of the amount of knowledge on the net than any sudden increase in popularity for the book. Worth reading.

The Stephen Wirtz Gallery has an interesting selection of Fukase’s work available online, including some older stuff that I haven’t been able to find elsewhere.

A more readily available book to buy is ‘Black Sun: The Eyes of Four’ which contains some of the Ravens series. It is, however, an awful book. Badly laid out and curated to death.

Other than that, odd pictures appear in anthologies. These are either Ravens photos or nudes.

Next month: Michael Kenna

Some related posts chosen by the software:

• Japanese Photography 2
• Japanese Modern Masters
• Japanese photographers (Iwanami Shoten top 40)