Private Scenes

This book brings together, for the first time, the entire “Private Scenes” photographic series in which we discover a new dimension of the work of Masahisa Fukase, that of the artist struggling with his medium. This singular corpus is made up of images in which the artist inserts himself. 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 now each print is enhanced with color paints, thus becoming a unique work.

This final series bears witness to Fukase's questions about his own practice of photography at the end of his life, and 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 through two essays.