Private Scenes

Private Scenes – Private Scenes – This book gathers, for the first time, the entire photographic series Private Scenes in which we discover a new dimension of Masahisa Fukase’s work, that of the artist grappling with his medium. This singular body of work is composed of images in which the artist inserts himself. As the photographer explains: “The self that sees is also the self that is seen. Every time I point the viewfinder, I am also looked at. […] I have reached a point where I wonder how I appear to be part of this process. The subject of the gaze is also its object.” The series is composed 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 from then on each print is enhanced with colored paints, thus becoming a unique work.

This final series reflects Fukase’s questioning of 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, Japanese photographic historian, explore this work through two essays.