Fukase, Masahisa, et al. The Solitude of Ravens: A Photographic Narrative. First United States edition, Published by Bedford Arts, 1991.
In 1976, at the time of his divorce, photographer Masahisa Fukase (1934-2014) began a train journey from Tokyo to the northern island of Hokkaido, his birthplace. Haunted by the end of his marriage, the trip initiated a ten-year obsession with the dark edged world of the raven…
“In Japan, perhaps the questioning of the face as the representation of the man behind it is more customary than it is in the West. Unsmiling and impassive expressions represent not only profound misery but also reflect the notion of Buddhist mercy. I like to think of Fukase in this way, for it respectfully leaves intact the initial mystery his face presents and the enduring mystery his photographs need to survive as works of art….
Finding an apposite expression for the spirit of the object, the event, the site, or the state of mind is a part—really the essential part—of the tradition of Japanese art. In the past this expression was always quiet and refined. As the spirit of personal experience erupted and came to the surface, the new photography was wrenched into different forms. What confuses most Western viewers about this work is not so much that it stems from an unknowable, secret Japanese source, but that it is expressionistic by nature. In looking back over the last 150 years of photography, one finds very few true expressionists. Photography is a medium that has mostly been used as an analytic tool or a device for recording responses to a given situation. Even Stieglitz’s notion of equivalence, which had its origin in the photographer’s emotional state, was a technique of calculated self-examination. The slap-back-at-the-world reaction of Weegee or the spill-your-guts out attitude of William Klein are relative oddities that have now been domesticated by their incorporation into the canon of great photography. Of those who made photographs of experience lived and felt, only a very few could sustain the intensity of that experience and make it into something larger than an immediate visceral scream. This is what Frank’s The Americans did for a photographer suffering from the moral disintegration of the exterior world, and this is what Fukase’s The Solitude of Ravens does for a photographer, one would guess, suffering from the collapse of a personal interior universe…
Perhaps only a man subsumed by despair could have imagined beginning such a book as this, but certainly only a great artist could have made an obsession of personal pain and survived a decade of its torture with something coherent to show others. In creating these photographs, Fukase’s earlier limited use of expressionistic techniques were employed masterfully as if they served him as a set of durable, case-hardened tools devoted to the cause of lamentation. As his life changed and he accepted the companionship of ravens, his restless style settled. And so did his face, which, beyond his photographs, is all I am privileged to know.”
(adapted from the introductory note by “Fukase’s Face and Photographs” David Travis.
The Dog's Tooth 