「NEW BOOKS」 Yoko Fukase Masahisa Photo Collection

Fukase Masahisa's timeless masterpiece "Yoko" - miraculously reprinted!

"Whether we call this deep commonality with others love or a mirror, it is probably the same thing." (Masako Toda)

"Yoko" by Masahisa Fukase, published in 1978 as part of Asahi Sonorama Photo Selection 8, is considered to be the defining series of Fukase's work, but it has been out of print for a long time. This book, published for the first time in about half a century, contains all the original photographs and texts, supervised by Tomo Kosuga, director of the Masahisa Fukase Archives, with the full cooperation of Yoko Miyoshi, the model.
Additionally, the book includes newly added referenced texts from the time, a contribution by Toda Masako, and a message from Miyoshi Yoko regarding the republication, exploring the significance of this classic photo book being revived after so much time from the perspective of its structure and binding.

"Here is a record of one man photographing one woman over a period of more than 10 years." (Yamagishi Shoji)
Fukase and Yoko met in 1963 and married in 1964. In the 1960s, they photographed each other at the Soka Matsubara housing complex where the newlyweds lived, and in the 1970s, they photographed each other in various locations, including Fukase's hometown of Hokkaido, Yoko's birthplace of Kanazawa, Izu, and Kyoto. In 1973, they produced a series titled Untitled (From the Window), in which they used a telephoto lens to capture Yoko in various poses as she headed to work each morning, dressed stylishly, through the window of their fourth-floor home. These photographs were published intermittently in the magazine Camera Mainichi between 1964 and 1976.
In 1974, Fukase's work was exhibited at the "New Japanese Photography" exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, and photographs were also taken of the trip the two of them took to Japan.

Fukase pursued the self thoroughly, and continued to turn his camera on himself and those close to him. "As his private life was brought into his work and his private life became public, a paradox gradually emerged, as if they were together to take a photograph" (Tomo Kosuga). The couple divorced in 1976, and two years later, the photo book Yoko (Asahi Sonorama) was completed. The cover of the book shows Yoko in a kimono, looking back at the viewer, beneath a pane of glass that has been broken in a radial pattern.

For this reprint, the book has been enlarged to enhance the viewer's appreciation of each photograph, and pages featuring photographs of crows, which fly in here and there as if to hint at the couple's future, have been arranged more quietly.
What did Fukase capture in "Yoko"? With the spirit of the times that the postwar generation carries as a backdrop, we can look at the relationship between the two, which is both an essential question and a possibility of photography, and hope that "Yoko" will take flight into the present with a more free-flowing scale.

Publisher  Akaakasha

Published 2025

Pages 168

Size  245x245mm