from magazines to gallery walls: rethinking fukase

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Eizōgaku, No.104, pp.219-241, 2020 ©2020 The Japan Society of Image Arts and Sciences

From Magazines to Gallery Walls: Rethinking Fukase Masahisa’s “Ravens” and the Workshop School of Photography in 1976 Japan

VOYAU Elise*1

In the 1970s, Japanese photography underwent crucial changes, which allowed it to grow into a significant field in today’s global art scene. By comparing a major photographic series of the time——Fukase Masahisa’s “Ravens” (1976-1982)——and the activities of the Workshop School of Photography (1974-1976), this article sug-gests that these changes materialized around the concept of the original print, and the passage from the printed medium to the exhibition medium. From here this article par-ticularly seeks to understand the theoretical context of the debates that these changes sparked in post 1968 Japan.

Key words: photography, 1970s, Japanese contemporary art, Fukase Masahisa, photography exhibition

Introduction

The photographer Fukase Masahisa (1934-2012) is undeniably one of the most significant figures of Japanese photography, and while his name was forgotten for some time, the recent activity of the Fukase Masahisa Archives——which were cre-ated five years ago——has given him the attention he so rightly deserves.(1) Multiple exhibitions, both in Japan and Europe, have showcased modern and vintage prints, and the republishing of photobooks has allowed easier access to his major series. With the resurgence of interest in Japanese photography in museums and academic circles, this is the opportune moment for a fresh perspective on his work.

Fukase is known for two major series: “Yohko” and “Ravens” (Karasu),(2) which were published in the form of photobooks in 1978 and 1986 respectively.(3) “Yohko,” was originally published in February 1974 in the magazine Kamera Mainichi and features the photographer’s wife in the setting of their everyday life. “Ravens” was

＊1 National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations (Inalco)/Japanese photography history

220 From Magazines to Gallery Walls ｜ Voyau Elise

launched two years later in October 1976 and was named after the black birds that haunt the series, and which were seen as symbols of Fukase’s solitude after his divorce from Yohko. Both series were featured in group exhibitions in the United States and Europe. “Yohko” was exhibited in New Japanese Photography(4) at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1974 and Neue Fotografie aus Japan(5) in Graz, Austria in 1976; “Ravens” appeared in Japan, a Self-portrait(6) in the International Center of Pho-tography in New York in 1979, and in Black Sun(7) in the Oxford Museum of Modern Art in 1985. These exhibitions consolidated Fukase’s reputation as a major photogra-pher both in Japan and the West. If the two series are very different in terms of style and subject, they are strongly associated by the underlying story that links them, from the happiness of marital life to the despair of its loss, and this depiction of personal narratives connects Fukase to the “I-photography” (shi-shashin) movement.(8)

“I-photography” was a major genre in 1970s Japanese photography. It derived its name from the “I-novel” (shi-shōsetsu) literary genre, characterized by first-person narration describing the author’s private experiences. This genre became well-known thanks to Araki Nobuyoshi’s work and in particular his 1971 photobook, Sentimental Journey (Senchimentaru na tabi),(9) which is centered on his honeymoon. Fukase him-self often played with the “I-photography” concept and used the private angle to com-municate through many of his works.

However, I contend that conventions of “I-photography” have been overused in commentary on Fukase’s work to date, and now contemporary academic research needs to go further in endeavors to understand it. Using Fukase’s personal history alone to interpret his work means accepting his own storytelling verbatim, without question-ing it. A more fruitful approach, for instance, is to look at his career choices as a pho-tographer. In 1976 Fukase was a key member of the Workshop School of Photography (Wākushoppu shashin gakkō). Along with the other members, Tōmatsu Shōmei, Hosoe Eikō, Moriyama Daidō, Araki Nobuyoshi, and Yokosuka Noriaki, he organized one of the first large-scale exhibitions of photography openly designed for the purpose of sell-ing original prints. This event was at the heart of many debates and triggered crucial changes in the photography industry. The fact that “Ravens”, Fukase’s first original print solo exhibition, was launched a few months later is certainly no coincidence.

This paper aims to rethink Fukase Masahisa’s “Ravens” series, not in the light of his personal history, but in the light of his activities within the Workshop School of Photography, to understand better his motivations as a photographer and the impact

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it had on the rest of his career. This paper will discuss the “Ravens” series in detailed relation to the Workshop School’s initiatives. It will then shed light on the theoretical context that fed the debates around the exhibitions, and finally examine the impact that the events of 1976 had on Fukase’s later work.

Through this close examination of a major artist in Japan, this paper endeavors to gain greater insights into wider issues such as the implications of the rise of the art market in a full economic growth in Japan, and the conflicting theories on the image that arose after the media criticism of the 1960s.

1. Comparing Fukase’s Ravens and the Workshop School of Photography’s We Sell Photographs exhibitions

1.1 Fukase and the context of Japanese photography in the 1960sBorn in 1934 in Hokkaido, Fukase Masahisa spent his entire career in Tokyo,

where he started as a photographer in the advertising business. He received recognition in the early 1960s thanks to his series “Color Approach” (Karā Apurōchi), published between June and December 1962 in the magazine Kamera Mainichi which launched his career and featured his work regularly until its closure in 1985. Fukase’s success became established in the 1970s, with the publication of his major photobooks, Yūgi (Homo Ludence),(10) Yohko, and later Ravens, and his participation in international group exhibitions in the 1970s and the 1980s. But Fukase’s career came to a brutal end one evening in June 1992 during the rainy season, when he fell down the stairs of a bar in Tokyo. Fukase survived the fall but suffered a serious head injury and remained un-able to take photographs until his death in 2012.

Fukase’s activity, which stretched throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, offers a particularly clear insight into the three main mediums Japanese photographers could use in that period to build their careers: the magazine, the photobook, and the exhibi-tion.

When Fukase started his professional activity in the late 1950s, the magazine was undeniably the most powerful medium in the industry, and popular titles such as Kamera Mainichi or Asahi Kamera, financed as they were by corporate press groups, had launched many important careers. On the other hand, photobook production, which flourished in the 1960s and 1970s, was closely linked to the press, as many of the books were compilations of selections of photos previously published in magazines.


This was the case for Fukase’s earlier books: Yūgi was published in the “Contemporary Images” (Eizō no gendai) collection curated by the Kamera Mainichi editor Yamagishi Shōji, and Yohko was published in the “Asahi Sonorama” collection.

The concept of the “original print”, whereby a photograph is printed directly by the creator of a picture (or under his supervision), signed as a work of one photogra-pher, and sold as suitable for exhibitions and the art market, was acknowledged more slowly in Japan than in the United States, where the market had been rising since the early 1970s. The events of 1976, however, reveal that many photographers in Japan, including Fukase, tried to change this situation and took new initiatives to disrupt the established system.

1.2 1976, The “Ravens” series1976 was a turning point in Fukase Masahisa’s career. After participating in two

major group exhibitions in 1974 and 1976 that had introduced Japanese photography to international audiences for the first time, he debuted the “Ravens” series. This would come to be seen as his magnum opus and consecrated him as one of the most important photographers of his generation.

Two years prior to the “Ravens” series, Fukase had published a series about his wife “Yohko” in Kamera Mainichi, which strengthened the image of Fukase as an intimate photographer of his private life——an impression that had already been pre-sented in 1971 in his first book Yūgi also featuring his wife. It seems almost natural that when he presented his new series “Ravens” in 1976, he showcased it as a sequel to “Yohko”: after the marriage comes the break-up, the solitude, and the depression. Al-though the pictures themselves have nothing to do with Yōko, the text Fukase wrote in Kamera Mainichi with the “Ravens” series in November 1976(11) explicitly links it with his personal story: he describes how after his divorce, he got on a train with a bottle of whisky for a long and lonely trip back to his hometown up in northern Japan.

Whether it should be called a strategy or a sign of his talent as a storyteller is up to interpretation, but it is certain that the powerful storyline behind the “Ravens” images casts a shadow on a more practical, but relevant context of the creation of the series: for Fukase, “Ravens” was, above all, the beginning of his solo exhibition activity. Before 1976 he had actually produced two solo exhibitions: Sky above an Oil Refinery (Seiyujo no sora) in 1960 and Kill the Pigs (Buta o korose) in 1961. None of the original prints of these two exhibitions are preserved today, which already indicates

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the low perception of their value at the time, but it is probable that Fukase did not even make the prints himself, as it was common to entrust the printing process to a special-ized company. Such was the case for an event as important as the New Japanese Pho-tography exhibition for which most of the prints were executed by a Japanese printing company and then sent to New York, all at the MoMA’s expense.(12)

Ravens was Fukase’s first solo exhibition in almost fifteen years, and from 1976, he would launch one or more almost every year. But “Ravens” was not only a starting point for recurring exhibitions, it also was the first time the print itself was at the center of the project. Unlike his previous work, which was systematically published in maga-zines, “Ravens” was designed to be simultaneously featured in Kamera Mainichi and at an exhibition at the Nikon Salon Showroom. The first chapter of “Ravens” appeared in October 1976 in Kamera Mainichi and was presented in the Ginza Nikon Salon from October 5th to 10th (Fig. 2). The series continued both in Kamera Mainichi and the Nikon Salon up until 1982.(13)

Fukase produced his prints himself for the entire duration of the series and com-mented on his printing techniques in occasional texts published in Kamera Mainichi. In the first half of the seventies, the “rough, blurred, out of focus” (are, bure boke) aes-thetic influenced by Provoke was extremely popular, and many photographers offered pictures with violent contrasts of whites and blacks; but in “Ravens”, Fukase made a habit of producing his prints in low contrast, highlighting nuances of grey, rendering details more visible, and using high-quality Agfa paper, which was expensive and rare at the time.(14) He immediately became widely known for the quality of his printing. Bearing this in mind, the raven motif appears in a whole new light. More than a sym-bol of solitude, the sharp silhouettes of the black birds against the grey skies and white snow of Hokkaidō appear as a perfect motif for infinite experimentation with scales of black and white (Fig. 1). It is now more understandable why in 1979 Tōmatsu Shōmei and Araki Nobuyoshi agreed on one comment about “Ravens”: “This is formalism”.(15)

To understand the trigger that pushed Fukase to make such a monumental change to his practice in 1976, it is essential to take a closer look at the activities of the Work-shop School of Photography where Fukase himself was teaching.

1.3. The We Sell Photographs exhibition and debates around the concept of the original print

The Workshop School of Photography (Wākushoppu shashin gakkō) was founded


in 1974 by Tōmatsu Shōmei. His vision was to provide a space for the discussion and transmission of photography, and one that was more independent and less commercial-ly-oriented than the photography departments of certain universities and the education they offered.(16) He gathered around his project five other notable photographers: Hosoe Eikō, Moriyama Daidō, Araki Nobuyoshi, Yokosuka Noriaki, and Fukase Masahisa, each responsible for a seminar.

With such prominent personalities, it is surprising that Workshop today does not have the popularity of other photographers’ groups such as Provoke or Vivo, to which it was compared at the time. This can probably be explained by the fact that the ambition of the group was not to focus on one style or one theoretical manifesto: the six partici-pating photographers each had their own style, as they all were already well advanced

Fig. 2 Fukase Masahisa ʻRavensʼ(Karasu) exhibition view, Ginza Nikon Salon, 1976

Fig. 1 Fukase Masahisa, Erimo Cape (Erimo Misaki) from the series “Ravens” (Karasu), 1976 © Masahisa Fukase Archives

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in their careers. Instead, the aim was more of a practical one: the idea behind Work-shop, which was announced in the associated periodical Kikan Workshop (Workshop Quarterly), was to create a new system in which the photographer had more autonomy and could live off his art, emancipated from commercial work and the publishing in-dustry. The school had a major influence on many young photographers debuting in the 1970s, and on the teachers themselves, including Fukase.

The most radical action of the group was the organization of the We Sell Photo-graphs (Shashin Urimasu) exhibition. In addition to the six Workshop members, six other major photographers (Ishimoto Yasuhiro, Kawada Kikuji, Sawatari Hajime, Tat-suki Yoshihiro, Narahara Ikkō, Morinaga Jun) participated in the event that took place in the Shiseido The Ginza Gallery (Shisseidō Za Ginza), from February 12th to 24th, 1976. The twelve photographers each exhibited their most acclaimed or recent series, and as the title suggests, any visitor could buy a print for the fixed price of 30,000 yen (approximately 900 USD at that time). Fukase presented his then most distinguished series, “Yohko”.

The Winter 1976 issue of Kikan Workshop is dedicated entirely to this exhibition: amongst presentations of all the series exhibited, the articles’ titles speak eloquently on the main purpose of the project: “Photo Prices: Onward and Upward”,(17) “The Im-portance of the Quality of a Print” (Purinto kuworitī no jūyōsei),(18) “How to Preserve Photographs Longer” (Sashin no chōki hozon hō),(19) “Preventing the Discoloration of Color Photographs” (Karā shashin no hentaishoku bōshi)(20) etc. From these titles, it appears clear that the Workshop members were promulgating the photographic print——as opposed to the magazine——as a key object for photographers to establish themselves.

In a long conversation published in this issue, Hosoe Eikō and the photographer Narahara Ikkō discussed their recent shared experiences in the United States, how they were inspired to change the situation in Japan, and what new standards the print brought to photography:

Narahara: When it comes to printed (insatsu) photos, I think that the tendency to-wards abstraction, the image (imēji) takes over. But in the case of original prints, one sees not only the image, but also the substance; sensual folds engraved in the photographic paper and various other tangible elements that strike the eye, the matière; I think that there is such a substantial quality in the original print. (…)


Hosoe: I guess in the original print I look for the artist’s subjectivity to appear in a very tangible way.(21)

However, while this exhibition brought together influential names from the pho-tography world, it was far from receiving unanimously positive feedback. The most violent reaction to the event can be observed in the Asahi Kamera magazine. The edi-tor Ōsaki Norio, alongside most of the contributing journalists, expressed their strong disagreement to the We Sell Photographs exhibition in an anonymous roundtable pub-lished in April 1976:

C: One of the reasons that photographers returning from the United States sell original prints is that they do not think about the culture and environment specific to Japan, they just do it because it is done in the United States, as a direct import. (…) People coming back from Europe and America are importing ideas that are ridiculously late (…)C: As there is on the one hand a tendency (in Japan) to be far more radical than foreign photographers, on the other, there is also a tendency that seems to be stuck in a kind of a weird art ideology.A: The way of exhibiting is the same as the traditional painting exhibition that has been going on forever. This exhibition is nothing but pretentiously putting pieces in frames and hanging them next to each other in one line up. They are all in their frames, well protected behind their glass. It’s tableau-ism (taburo-shugi) to the extreme. In this way of exhibiting I think the essence of photography gets further and further away.(22)

The April special issue of the same year features another roundtable titled “Back to the Photography, Back to the Things” (Shashin ni kaere, jibutsu e kaere), bringing together Kuwabara Kineo, Watanabe Tsutomu and Nakahira Takuma, who took the op-portunity to address the exhibition with the same vehemence: “What is “original” here? It’s a reproduction being reproduced, to make another reproduction. And they call it original. Who are they kidding?”(23)

The detractors of the Workshop photographers attacked their intentions to give economic value to an object that is infinitely reproducible, and were highly disinclined to the idea of an art market for photography, as many of them had a vested financial in-

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terest in keeping the economic value of photographers’ work trapped within the pages of magazines.

The Workshop members did not stay silent while being so openly criticized, and their reaction was proportionate to the attack. As with most independent, self-financed projects, The Workshop School did not last long: it closed at the end of March 1976. In the last issue of their quarterly paper, the members squared up to their detractors and openly expressed their frustration in a final roundtable, albeit also anonymously. The title, “Cut the Photo Magazines!” (Shashin zasshi o kiru!), echoes a humoristic carica-ture of the six members dressed as ninjas wielding swords. In the interview, they also evoked the well-known story of the rebellion of the 47 rōnin against Yoshinaka Kira, using it as an allegory for their own rebellion against the camera magazine, embodied by the powerful figure of Ōsaki Norio, chief editor of Asahi Kamera and creator of Nora-Sha publishing.

B: Many young photographers cannot think of anywhere other than the magazine to present their work. Some sort of system has been established. A system where publishing in a magazine is the one and only way to present, and where maga-zines are the only medium. And getting used to this caused considerable damage. (…) Now all I can say is that we have to create our own space to present our pho-tos. (…)A: We are not saying that the print, or in other words the photo exhibition, is the only presentation format. In their interview in Kikan Workshop No. 6 Hosoe and Narahara said that print (inga) medium and printed (insatsu) medium are not con-tradictory but are both equally necessary mediums.F: In Asahi Kamera’s reporters roundtable, someone said, I think it’s probably Ōsaki: “What if from now on we called the people who did the We Sell Photo-graphs exhibition the tableau group? (laughs).” I follow his example by saying: what if from now on, we called the people in the power position, that squeeze the milk out of photography and pick fights with the original print the “enemies of photographers!!”(24)

Accused of making photography an “art”, and thus betraying the “essence of photography”,(25) The Workshop photographers responded with practical arguments, reminding readers of the financial situation of most photographers by the mid-1970s,


which was to be dependent on their magazine earnings. To understand how such a gap was made possible between these two ways of thinking, it is necessary to dig into the theoretical roots of these passionate debates.

2. Reactivating Art (geijutsu) vs Document (kiroku) in the Context of the 1960s Japanese Art Scene

2.1 Why reactivating the debate? The political implication behind kirokuIn these 1976 debates around the original print, it is interesting to note that the

photographers and critiques, mainly on the Asahi Kamera side, repeatedly placed into opposition the reproduction (fukusei) and the original (orijinaru), the publishing and the exhibition, the printed (insatsu) and the print (inga), art (geijutsu) and document (kiroku). This opposition implies a fundamental contradiction between the mechanical work that is the printed medium, and the handmade work that is the print, or in other words, between the man and the machine. But the question of whether photography is a mechanical or a liberal art has been debated since the invention of photography it-self: at first it appears as though the Japanese critics did nothing but stir old narratives. However, a better understanding of the Japanese political context compels one to admit otherwise.

In fact, words such as geijutsu and kiroku had already been discussed as key con-cepts in the art scene throughout the 1960s. Geijutsu in particular was a crucial topic, as a strong movement of anti-art/non-art (han-geijutsu/hi-geijutsu) arose in the early 1960s, challenging the former definitions of “art”, as Tomii Reiko analyzes in her essay “Geijutsu on Their Minds: Memorable Words on Anti-Art.”(26)

In the 1960s, the mass demonstrations against the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security Between the United States and Japan (or Anpo) nurtured defiance against all official government initiatives. As a reaction to overly-conservative official art sa-lons, independent ones were then created to provide space for new anti-art expressions. These initiatives did not directly concern photography. A photograph could in fact appear in an art exhibition as a document of a performance, or as a part of an installa-tion, but not as a work of art in itself. But the anti-establishment spirit still reached the photographers active in independent publications, where the boundaries between disci-plines were more porous. By the end of the 1960s almost every member of the Work-shop School had been active in New Left-friendly initiatives through their work as

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photographers. Tōmatsu Shōmei, for example, created the independent magazine Ken (1970-1971), which openly criticized the Osaka World Expo project of 1970. Mori-yama became a member of the Provoke (1968-1969) group, which developed a radical photography theory. Hosoe became famous for his collaboration with the controversial butō dancer Hijikata Tatsumi. While not amongst his most recognized works today, Fukase also actively produced avant-garde series in the early 1970s that placed him on the political chessboard. Between 1967 and 1972, for instance, he collaborated with the leftist periodical Asahi Journal, which featured bold young photographers such as Moriyama Daidō and Nakahira Takuma. In his series “Himiko’s Descendents” (Hi-miko no kōei) published in the 1970 November 15th issue, naked butō dancers appear in a helicopter flying above the Diet building, as an open provocation to established politics. Nudity was a recurring theme in Fukase’s early 1970s works, as it can still be seen in the Kazoku (Family) album,(27) where he asked butō dancers or artists of the underground scene to appear naked in family pictures. This brutal inclusion of nudity in scenes of standardized everyday life was a central motif in the provocative 1960s art scene, especially in performance groups, and it was considerably reflected in Fukase’s work at the time.(28)

The term kiroku (which can be translated as “record” or “document”), on the other hand, also had a recent history in the context of postwar photography. It was first as-sociated with the social realism movement that expanded after the war when Kimura Ihei, defending the objectivity of the photographic mechanical process, said: “However much life experience I may or may not have, after I press the shutter release, I’m noth-ing”.(29) But this idealistic way of seeing the camera as the absolute objective tool for social realism was shattered by political events that took place in the early 1970s and were discussed by Nakahira Takuma. A few years after his participation in the maga-zine Provoke between 1968 and 1969, the critic and photographer had indeed entered a phase whereby he rejected his own work and questioned the place of photography in contemporary society. In a special issue dedicated to the theme “Photography and Document” (Shashin to kiroku) in July 1972 of the Bijutsu Techō art magazine, Naka-hira published an article whose title alone——“The Documentary Illusion” (Kiroku to iu gen’ei)(30)——clearly establishes his stance that photography’s supposedly objective capacity to record reality is in fact deceitful. Recent political events had indeed reaf-firmed the power of the photographic image in society: in “The Documentary Illusion” Nakahira returned in particular to the trial of a young student accused of having killed


a police officer, whose death was caused by a Molotov cocktail, during a violent dem-onstration in Okinawa in 1971. The prosecution was mainly based on a photograph of the student, who had made the front page of the newspaper Yomiuri Shinbun on November 11th, 1971, which presented him as attacking the policeman while he was in fact trying to put out the flames.

Nakahira developed these reflections on the photographic document and its de-ceptive power in another text, published in a collection of essays in 1973 “Why an Il-lustrated Botanical Dictionary?” (Naze shokubutsu zukan ka),(31) in which, rejecting his previous photographic work, he started a “quest for ‘true’ photographic realism”.(32) He addressed——albeit obliquely——the question of the original print:

By using the machine that is the camera I was trying to make old-fashioned “art” and “expression” happen. (…) This is undeniably related to the fact that, still using the machine that is the camera, I had chosen the monochrome, which pro-duced what I was not yet able to give up, a “trace of the hand” (because there still was manual work left to do in the darkroom).(33)

To his opinion, his previous work in Provoke still tended toward a form of artistic expression because the dark room process demands manual, tangible work from the photographers. Therefore, he claimed the necessity of a complete disengagement from the darkroom print process, to achieve an even more radical photographic practice and eliminate all forms of self-expression. Abandoning monochrome and moving to color was for Nakahira a way to entrust someone else with the printing, and to make sure his only action in the photographic process was to press the shutter release:

And that is why it has to be color photography. Because I want to throw away the “trace of the hand” that, when choosing monochrome, happens in the darkroom process I previously wrote about. It is because of this hand that art emerged (…) Once I press the shutter release, all is done.(34)

It appears clearly that the desire “for the artist’s subjectivity to appear in a very tangible way”(35) evoked by Hosoe in the Kikan Workshop special We Sell Photographs issue comes in total contradiction to Nakahira’s ideas. And it is now more understand-able that the most disturbing thing for Nakahira and his peers was not the action of

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selling photography as art in itself, but rather who committed this action. As Mori-yama, Fukase, and Tōmatsu were active in the anti-establishment movement in the 1960s, their attempt to build an institutionalized author-based system of photography had to be seen as a form of treason by Nakahira.

2.2 Is the original print geijutsu?Was it, however, the Workshop School of Photography’s first goal to make an

“art” of photography? The term geijutsu shashin (art photography) already had a long history in Japan, since it refers to the pictorialist movement that developed in Japan in the early 20th century: the desire for high-quality printing already existed then and subsisted in amateur practice. The fact that the 1970s concept of “original print” came directly as a transliteration of the English word, orijinaru purinto, shows clearly that the movement did not come from Japan but rather from Western countries and, more precisely, the United States.

The term “original print” started to appear in the early 1970s, when photographers such as Hosoe Eikō came back from trips in the United States full of enthusiasm about the emerging market they witnessed across the ocean. Along with Narahara, who spent four years in the United States, or the Kamera Mainichi editor Yamagishi Shōji, who collaborated with the New York Museum of Modern Art photography department di-rector John Szarkowski, artists imported the concept as something that Japan had to be rapidly “catching up” on to stay up to date on the international scene. Yamagishi was notably said to have started wearing gloves to handle photographs in the selection pro-cess for Kamera Mainichi, after his return from a trip in the United States, when he had no consideration for them before going.(36) This shows how suddenly Yamagishi came to look at the print as a delicate, valuable object, when in the past it was considered as nothing more but a step before the finished product that was the magazine.

Recent academic studies have concerned themselves with the practical aspects of the development of the original print concept, showing how initiatives——such as exhibitions and collections——were taken to develop wider interest in photography.(37) These initiatives were notably taken by schools and universities educating young photographers to keep a record of their works in the form of prints. This was the case at the Nihon University photography department, which, under the direction of Kana-maru Shigene, started a collection of its students’ prints in 1973. The department also launched a journal, Fons et Origo, promoting a new evaluation of the original print and


providing definitions of what can be called original and how prints should be handled. Many photographers appeared in its pages to develop their argument about the original print, amongst them Moriyama Daidō:

In the past, I was absolutely convinced that a photograph could not be called a photograph unless it passed through a rotary press. In other words, the process of infinitely duplicating by printing and distributing, by any medium, was the one and only way to unmistakably make a photograph. I had a physiological disdain for any photograph made in the purpose of aesthetic appreciation, ornamental use, preservation, or collection. At the time, a polished piece of photography, all beau-tifully executed was for me nothing but some static, work-of-arty type thing. (…)Now I want to think of the original print as minimal and personal communication, but I also want to achieve mass communication by the means of a gigantic rotary press.(38)

It is easily noticeable in these essays that the Workshop photographers did not, through their school or their practice, identify as an art movement and barely used the word “art” to talk about photography. Their approach tended to present this new exhibition and gallery-oriented practice as one form, amongst others, of communica-tion that did not change the nature of a photograph. The debates around the We Sell Photographs exhibition seemed to have contrasted, on one side, attempts at essentialist definitions of photography, with a much more down-to-earth approach on the other. But the crux of the conflict, rather, appears to be the question of acceptance or rejection of American hegemony. Just as Asahi Kamera journalists accused the Workshop mem-bers of imitating the American photography market, the Workshop group, with a name directly imported from the United States, could not deny its intentions to integrate with the international art scene. This stresses how, in the context of the 1960s and 1970s, the question of the art market and the artist’s status could not be addressed in Japan with-out considering the American paradigm.

3. After Workshop School of Photography: towards a “tableau” photography?

3.1 “Is Workshop a trigger?”(39) Emancipating from the magazineThe broader context of the debates around photography clearly provides a new

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perspective on Fukase’s long-celebrated “Ravens” series. Opened just a few months after the We Sell Photographs exhibition, Ravens was for Fukase the start of his solo exhibition activity focusing on print quality, and it is clear that it was his first attempt at shifting his practice from a magazine- to an exhibition-oriented approach.

The Workshop School of Photography in which he took part gave an impulse to new initiatives. The school closed only two years after its opening for lack of funds, but its impact lasted long after: many photographers who followed the Workshop’s seminars organized as groups and created independent galleries (jishu garō), such as Camp, financed by the photographers themselves.(40) This created a cohesion around printing activity: they shared developing spaces and organized exhibitions as Kaneko Ryuichi’s book Independent Photographers in Japan 1976-83 describes.(41) The market itself however took time to develop in Japan, and the first commercial galleries special-izing in photography only opened in the late 1970s (such as Zeit Foto Salon in 1978 and Photo Gallery International in 1979). Most of the photographers at the time still lived off their magazine and book publications, commercial activities, and teaching jobs.

While the market for the original print did not develop as quickly as the Japanese photographers had hoped, it still deeply changed their practice as early as the mid-1970s. The example of Fukase is in this regard very relevant, and the evolution of his practice since “Ravens” shows how photography changed to the form we know today.

This shift from the magazine to the print first manifested in the layout of the mag-azines themselves. Through the evolution of the “Ravens” series in Kamera Mainichi, one can observe that the pictures took more and more space on the pages; the first chapter in October 1976 had a more journalistic layout, but by the last chapter in No-vember 1982, the photos spread through the double page, with visible holes of the film on the edges, reminding readers of the object that is the film. This can surely be read as a desire to break free from the material limits of the magazine.

The most noticeable sign of this emancipation from the magazine in Fukase’s work after 1976 is the size of his prints. The publication of photography necessar-ily implicated a limit in the format, and the size of the photographs was standardized. When photographers started to show their work in exhibitions, the sizing was mostly in line with the limits established by a double-page magazine spread: the prints in the first “Ravens” exhibitions in Nikon Salon were 24×30 cm. In the exhibition Japan: a self-portrait, at the International Center of Photography of New York, Fukase started to ex-


periment with the sizing and sent prints of “Ravens” that were notably larger than what he used to show at the Nikon Salon. The “Ravens” series was highly acclaimed in this exhibition, and in Araki’s slightly bitter opinion: “The Ravens in the ICP were praised because they were huge”.(42)

His experimentation with sizing took Fukase to bold extremes. In his last years of activity, he made prints of his series “Ravens” and “Memories of Father” (Chichi no kioku) almost reaching a two meters length for an exhibition that actually never took place. A photograph by Seto Masato, his friend and former assistant, showing Fukase posing in front of the prints, testifies to the remarkably large size of these late printed works (Fig. 3).

This evolution of the photograph from the printed medium in a magazine to a large-scale exhibitable work of art can undeniably be read in the light of what the historian Jean-François Chevrier called the “forme tableau” (tableau form). In the late 1980s his essay on the tableau form in photography, written on the occasion of the 1989 exhibition in Stuttgart Staatsgalerie Photo-Kunst: Arbeiten aus 150 Jahren (150 years of Photographic Art) became a reference in the understanding of contemporary photography.(43) He points to the fact that as photographs came to be exhibited on gal-lery walls, they became autonomous works of art existing for themselves. Conceived by the artists for the wall and the exhibition, the “tableau” photograph imposed a rela-tionship with the viewer drastically different from that with a magazine photograph and this monumentalization came with an increase in size of the exhibited prints.

Even though Chevrier maintained that to focus only on the upsizing of the pho-tographs represents an oversimplification of the concept of the “tableau”, the format is still an important indicator of a change in photography appreciation. It is particularly

Fig. 3 Seto Masato, Fukase Masahisa in Gallery Place M, ca. 1987-1990

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interesting to link Fukase’s evolution to Chevrier’s theory, as the Asahi Kamera cri-tiques and Nakahira himself called the Workshop School photographers the taburo-ha, the Japanese transcription for the French word “tableau” with the suffix “group”.

3.2 Fukase’s last exhibition: the print as a traceWhile Chevrier’s concept of “tableau” for Western contemporary photography

seems to fit into the evolution of many Japanese photographers’ work towards a more exhibition-oriented practice, it is known to have its limits, and does not take into ac-count other aspects of this evolution that do not directly concern the exhibition ap-paratus. Indeed, one of Fukase’s main concerns through the 1980s and early 1990s was what he called, just like Narahara and Hosoe, the “matière” (machiēru) of the photo-graph: “More than the photograph in itself, I was interested in the technique that gave life to its ‘matière’”.(44)

While the photograph gained autonomy and was separated from the magazine, it was no longer an immaterial “image”, as Narahara said in his conversation with Hosoe in Kikan Workshop, but rather an object, tangible, with its specific material properties. Fukase seemed profoundly aware of these considerations, and through the 1980s made experimental works using different photography techniques that challenged the color properties and the unidimensional surface of the paper. In his series “A Play” (Yūgi), designed for the exhibition Six Contemporary Photographers by Polaroid 20×24 that took place in Seibu Ikebukuro Art Forum in 1984, he handcrafted photographic mon-tages. He cut photographs and sewed the parts back together, piercing them with pins, and bringing them back to the flatness of a print by photographing the resulting mon-tage with a large-scale Polaroid machine. Fukase wrote about these experimentations with the Polaroid, which he had made for different series in the 1980s, and which rely entirely on the manual production of the print and not the shooting of a picture in itself, saying:

I was looking for originality, for individuality, for something that was me, for a quality that gives a handmade feel, to show my nonconformist self, and because of that I had to make my own prints even if I was bad at it.(45)

The last series Fukase exhibited before his tragic accident pushed these experi-mentations on the surface and the concept of “matière” further. Showcased in the Ginza


Nikon Salon from February 25th to March 2nd, 1992, the Private Scenes ’92 (Shikei ’92) exhibition featured a series of 8×10 cm black-and-white photographs, all randomly covered in paint. The colors, added by either a brush or his hands, gave a new dimen-sion to the prints, making each of them unique, as if the materiality of the photograph on its own was too limited and something had to be added to emphasize the “handmade feel”(46) that Fukase sought.

But Fukase went further: on many of these photographs, he left his fingerprints, intentionally inked in red, either on all the surface, or in the corners, just like a hanko, a vermillion seal used as a signature in most administrative paperwork in Japan (Fig. 4). The fingerprint as a motif made many appearances throughout Fukase’s career, starting in Kamera Mainichi June 1962 “Color Approach” series’ surrealist montages. But what had been a mere image in previous works literally materialized in this last series. Fukase left a fingerprint, a material trace of his presence that mirrored in a sense the material trace that a photographic print already constitutes.

These acts of hand-painting and leaving fingerprints evoke the previously-discussed “trace of the hand”(47) that Nakahira rejected in his essay “Why an Illustrated Botanical Dictionary?” By putting this “trace of the hand” motif at the center of this show, Fukase first appears to be in opposition to Nakahira’s essay. However, the stag-ing gives another dimension to the show. The photographs were randomly pinned on the wall and thrown on the floor, giving an impression of mess (Fig. 5). The formerly solemn staging of “Ravens” turned, with Shi-kei ’92, into chaos. Fukase’s obsessive smearing of the photographs then appears less as a creative gesture than as an auto-

Fig. 4 Fukase Masahisa, from the series “Hibi” exhibited in Ginza Nikon Salon, 1992 © Masahisa Fukase Archives

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matic one aiming to leave a trace, a document of his own existence. The title of the show itself, “private scenes”, reads “shi-kei” in Japanese and is a made-up word that translates to “I—scene” but is also a homophone for “death penalty”. It is tempting to interpret Fukase’s last show as the execution of the artist that he became. Repeating the same random and mechanical movements and denying what could be called an artistic process does not seem so far in intention from what Nakahira suggested in his essays in the early 1970s. This shows how Fukase was never naïve about the changes photo-graphic practice went through since the 1970s: as he positively took an active part in promulgating the original print and the exhibition as a new medium, he offered with this last show, however, a subversive take on the system he helped to implement, by lit-erally pulling the photographs out of their frames and taking them down from the wall.

Conclusion

Looking in depth at Fukase’s acclaimed series “Ravens” prompts many consid-erations, including broader insights into contemporary Japanese photography. In fact, more than anything, “Ravens” was a first attempt for Fukase to shift from photography production for the publishing industry to production of original prints for galleries and museums. It was made clear that such a shift, which happened not only for Fukase but for a generation of photographers, stirred debates on whether or not photography sold as an “original” work of art represented opportunistic surrender to a capitalist art indus-

Fig. 5 Fukase Masahisa ʻPrivate Scenes ʼ92ʼ (Shikei ʼ92) exhibition view, Ginza Nikon Salon, 1992


try. As the original print concept changed deeply the practice of many photographers, it also became a way of questioning the status of the artist on the contemporary global-ized scene.

It is undeniable that intimacy and personal experience were recurring themes in Fukase’s work, as in that of many others of his generation. However, reducing the “I-photography” movement to a general tendency to depict the intimate, and elaborate direct or symbolic auto-portraits is certainly an oversimplification of a more complex phenomenon. As it was described in his last show in particular, the “I” was for Fukase also the “I” photographer, who, by necessity, became author and artist, and had to be exposed on the international art scene, while having to deal with his own deep-rooted anti-establishment beliefs and the resistance against American hegemony.

However, this analysis only discloses one response to the problems that arose in the 1970s. Further inquiries would need more in-depth comparative analysis of the Jap-anese situation with that of Western countries, and particularly the United States. Addi-tionally, while the Workshop School of Photography’s actions centered around mutual goals, one could sense that not all six photographers had the same experience, practice, or views on photography. Beyond the American photography enthusiast Hosoe, the former Provoke member Moriyama, or the commercial photographer Yokosuka, rose differing opinions and various ways of seeking new practices. Further study of the evo-lution of these photographers’ work from the 1970s in comparison with that of Fukase or Nakahira could, without a doubt, offer a more thorough insight into the inclusion of Japanese photography in the global contemporary art market.

Notes(1) See also the first compilation of Fukase’s work for photobooks and magazines: Kosuga Tomo,

Masahisa Fukase (Paris: Éditions Xavier Barral, 2018).(2) The author makes a distinction between “Ravens” (in quotation marks), the series published in

Kamera Mainichi, and Ravens (italicized), title for the Nikon Salon exhibitions.(3) Fukase Masahisa, Yohko (Tokyo: Asahi sonorama, 1978). and Fukase Masahisa, Karasu (Ra-

vens) (Yokohama: Sōkyūsha, 1986).(4) John Szarkowski and Yamagishi Shōji, eds., New Japanese Photography (New York: Museum

of Modern Art, 1974).(5) Otto Breicha, Neue Fotografie Aus Japan (New Photography from Japan) (Graz: Styria, 1977).(6) Cornell Capa and Yamagishi Shōji, eds., Japan, a Self-Portrait (New York: International Cen-

ter of Photography, 1979).

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(7) Mark Holborn, ed., Black Sun: The Eyes of Four: Roots and Innovation in Japanese Photogra-phy (New York: Aperture, 1985).

(8) The association with I-photography was first made in the text written by Yamagishi Shōji in Fukase’s first published photobook: Fukase Masahisa, Yūgi (Homo Ludence), Eizō no gendai 4 (Tokyo: Chūō kōronsha, 1971). and remained until more recent studies such as: Iizawa Kōtarō, Shi-shashin ron (On I-Photography) (Tokyo: Chikuma Shobō, 2000).

(9) Araki Nobuyoshi, Senchimentaru na tabi (Sentimental Journey) (Tokyo: Araki Nobu-yoshi, 1971).

(10) Fukase Masahisa, Yūgi (Homo Ludence) (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1971).(11) Fukase Masahisa, “Karasu 2” (Ravens 2), Kamera Mainichi, November 1976, 85-98.(12) Kai Yoshiaki, “Distinctiveness versus Universality: Reconsidering New Japanese Photogra-

phy”, Local Culture/Global Photography 3, no. 2 (Spring 2013).(13) For a list of Fukase’s group and solo exhibitions, see the Masahisa Fukase Archives website:

http://masahisafukase.com/exhibitions/ (2020/05/10).(14) Fukase Masahisa, “Karasu 5” (Ravens 5), Kamera Mainichi, June 1979, 84-85.(15) Fukase Masahisa, “Karasu: shūshō” (Ravens: Last Chapter), Kamera Mainichi, November

1982, 202-203.(16) See the interview Tōmatsu gave in 2012 about the Workshop School : Tōmatsu Shōmei, Iiza-

wa Kōtarō, and Kitajima Keizō, “WORKSHOP Shashin Gakkō no inpakuto: Tōmatsu Shōmei intabyū” (The Impact of WORKSHOP School of Photography: Interview with Tōmatsu Shōmei), Photographers’ Gallery Press, no. 5 (April 2006): 124-139.

(17) Peter Pollack, “Photo-Print Prices: Onward and Upward”, Kikan Workshop, no. 6 (Janu-ary 1976): 72-73.

(18) Ina Nobuo, “Purinto kuoritī no juyōsei” (The Importance of the Quality of a Print), Kikan Workshop, no. 6 (January 1976): 1.

(19) East Street Gallery, “Shashin no chōki hozon hō” (How to Preserve Photographs Longer), Ki-kan Workshop, no. 6 (January 1976): 78-79.

(20) Miyakawa Toshio, “Karā shashin no hentaishoku bōshi” (Preventing the Discoloration of Color Photographs), Kikan Workshop, no. 6 (January 1976): 75-77.

(21) Hosoe Eikō and Narahara Ikkō, “Shashin no sutandādo” (The Photography Standards), Kikan Workshop, no. 6 (January 1976): 62-74, 63.

(22) Anonymous, “Honkisha zadankai: shashinten hassō no daitenkan ga nozomareru toki” (Round-table: When a Great Change in Photography Exhibition Is Needed), Asahi Kamera, April 1976, 249-252.

(23) Nakahira Takuma cited in: Watanabe Tsutomu, Kuwabara Kineo, and Nakahira Takuma, “Zadankai - shashin ni kaere, jibutsu e kaere” (Roundtable: Back to the Photography, Back to the Things), Asahi Kamera, April 1976, 6-12, 7.

(24) Anonymous, “Fukumen zadankai: Shashin zasshi o kiru!” (Anonymous Roundtable: Cut the Photo Magazines!), Kikan Workshop, no. 8 (July 1976): 58-71, 69-70.

(25) Anonymous, “Honkisha zadankai: Shashinten hassō no daitenkan ga nozomareru Toki” (Roundtable: When a Great Change in Photography Exhibition Is Needed).


(26) Tomii Reiko, “Geijutsu on Their Minds: Memorable Words on Anti-Art,” in Art, Anti-Art, Non-Art: Experimentations in the Public Sphere in Postwar Japan, 1950-1970 (Los Angeles: Getty research institute, 2007), 35-61.

(27) Fukase Masahisa, Kazoku (Family) (Tokyo: IPC, 1991).(28) Kuro DalaiJee, Nikutai no anākizumu: 1960 nendai nihon biijutsu ni okeru pafōmansu no

chika suimyaku (Anarchy of the Body: Undercurrents of Performance Art in 1960s Japan) (Tokyo: grambooks, 2010).

(29) Kimura Ihei cited in Ina Nobuo et al., “The Problems of Modern Photography (1953)”, in From Postwar to Postmodern: Art in Japan 1945-1989, trans. Holmberg Ryan, The Museum of Modern Art (New York, 2012), 53-58. Excerpted from Ina Nobuo et al., “Kindai shashin no mondai” (The Problems of Modern Photography), Kamera, October 1953, 65-73.

(30) Nakahira Takuma, “Kiroku to iu gen’ei: dokyumento kara monyumento e” (The Documen-tary Illusion: From the Document to the Monument), Bijutsu Techō, July 1972, 156-157. Title translation by Franz Prichard in Franz Prichard, Residual Futures: The Urban Ecologies of Literary and Visual Media of 1960s and 1970s Japan (New York: Columbia University Press., 2019), 234.

(31) Nakahira Takuma, Naze, shokubutsu zukan ka (Why an illustrated Botanical Dictionary?) (Tokyo: Chikuma Gakugei Bunko, 2007 (1973)).

(32) Philip Charrier, “Nakahira Takuma’s ‘Why an Illustrated Botanical Dictionary?’ (1973) and the Quest for ‘True’ Photographic Realism in Post-War Japan,” Japan Forum, 32 no.1 (Janu-ary 2, 2020): 56-82.

(33) Nakahira, Naze, shokubutsu zukan ka (Why an illustrated Botanical Dictionary?), 24.(34) Id. at 37.(35) Hosoe and Narahara, “Shashin no sutandādo” (The Photography Standards), 63.(36) Nishii Kazuo, Shashin henshūsha: Yamagishi Shōji e no omāju (A photography editor: An

hommage to Yamagishi Shōji) (Tokyo: Madosha, 2002), 62-63.(37) See: Hirose Akiyo, “Nihon ni okeru orijinaru purinto no gainen no seiritsu to sono tenkai ni

kan suru kenkyū” (A Study on the Formation and Development of the Concept ‘Original Print’ in Japan), Nihon Shashin Geijutsu Gakkai-Shi (Bulletin of the Japan Society for Arts and His-tory of Photography) 26, no. 1 (2017): 15-25. and: Yoshino Hiroaki, “‘Orijinaru purinto’ no gainen nitsuite no kōsatsu” (A Study of the Concept of the Word ‘Original Print’ in Japan), Nihon Shashin Geijutsu Gakkai-Shi (Bulletin of the Japan Society for Arts and History of Pho-tography) 11, no. 3 (2002): 7-16.

(38) Moriyama Daidō, “Boku no orijinaru purinto kō” (My Thoughts on Original Print),” Fons et Origo, 2, no.1 (Summer 1974): 31-32.

(39) Inami Kunio, “Shashin gakkō PR no pēji - wākushoppu wa kibakuza ka?” (School of Photog-raphy PR Page - Is Workshop a Trigger?), Kikan Workshop, no. 3 (March 1975): 15.

(40) Seto Masato, “Fukase Masahisa den (10) Fukase-san to shashin juku” (The Story of Fukase Masahisa (10) Fukase and Photography Schools), Nippon Kamera, August 2019, 147-149.

(41) Kaneko Ryūichi, Indipendento fotogurafazu in Japan, 1976-83 (Independent photographers in Japan, 1976-83) (Tokyo: Tokyo shoseki, 1989).

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(42) Fukase, “Karasu: shūshō” (Ravens: Last Chapter), 202.(43) Jean-François Chevrier, “Les aventures de la forme tableau dans l’histoire de la photographie,”

in Photo-kunst: Arbeiten aus 150 jahren. 150 ans de photographie du XXe au XIXe Siècle, aller et retour (Stuttgart: Cantz/Staatsgalerie, 1989), 9-81.

(44) Fukase Masahisa, “Hisashiburi no tajūrokō” (It Has Been a While I Have Done Superimposi-tion), Kamera Mainichi, March 1980, 156.

(45) Fukase Masahisa, “Sōten’nenshoku-teki gaikei: poraroido 8×10 firumu o ingashi gawarini karā no hikinobashi” (Urban Landscape in Natural Color: Using 8×10 Polaroids to Make a Color Print), Nippon Kamera, September 1985, 111.

(46) Ibid.(47) Nakahira, Naze, shokubutsu zukan ka (Why an illustrated Botanical Dictionary?). 24, 37.

Received March 15, 2020, Accepted May 19, 2020

from magazines to gallery walls: rethinking fukase

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