Masahisa FukasePrivate Scenes

This book brings together, for the first time, the entire Private Scenes photographic series, in which we discover a new dimension of Masahisa Fukase’s work, that of the artist grappling with his medium. This singular body of work is made up of images in which the artist inserts himself. As the photographer explains: “The self that sees is also the self that is seen. Every time I point the viewfinder, I am also being looked at. […] I’ve reached a point where I wonder how I appear to be an integral part of this process. The subject of the gaze is also its object. The series is made up of two sets: Letters from Journeys, which presents photographs taken in 1989 in different cities around the world (Paris, London, Brussels, Antwerp, etc.), and Private Scenes ’92, which focuses on his daily life in Tokyo, where each print is now enhanced with coloured paint, becoming a unique work.

This final series bears witness to Fukase’s questioning of his own practice of photography at the end of his life, and of the place of the photographer in his work, when subject and object overlap, also evoking the current practice of the selfie. Tomo Kosuga, director of the Masahisa Fukase Archives, and Masako Toda, historian of Japanese photography, explore this work in two essays.