From Window: A Photographer’s Obsession With His Wife And Freezing Time

“I work and photograph while hoping to stop everything. In that sense, my work may be some kind of revenge drama about living now.”

– Masahisa Fukase

 

 

One morning in the summer of 1973, Masahisa Fukase (25 February 1934 – 9 June 2012) photographed his wife since 1964, Yoko Wanibe, from the fourth-floor window of their apartment in Tokyo as she left for work at a gallery in Tokyo. The Japanese photographer did the same thing every morning until she divorced him in 1976. He called the series From Window.

Fukase’s From Window series appear as if he’s taken a series of snapshots. But this is tale of desire and obsession. She would describe their life together as moments of “suffocating dullness interspersed by violent and near suicidal flashes of excitement”. Nonetheless, for a long time the loving wife and trained actress played along, looking up at he took a picture, posing and dressing up.

 

 

But she came to believe that the ritual was not about her, but him. Her pictures were about his introspection, another part of his autobiography in images.“He has only seen me through the lens,” Yoko said. “I believe that all the photographs of me were unquestionably photographs of himself.”

It is illuminating to learn that he also photographed his first wife, Yukiyo Kawakami, continually – she appears in his first photobook, Yugi (1971).

 

 

“I work and photograph while hoping to stop everything. In that sense, my work may be some kind of revenge drama about living now.”

– Masahisa Fukase

 

 

 

 

He died in 2012, having been in a coma for 20 years following a fall down the stairs of a bar in 1992. Yoko visited him twice a month throughout his long limbo. “He remains part of my identity,” she said. “With a camera in front of his eye, he could see; not without.”

Via Another Language at Les Rencontres d’Arles