Masahisa Fukase

Masahisa Fukase is a 416-page monograph that presents the photographer's work across 26 series, from the ravens he is best known for to collages, self-portraits, cat pictures and reworked photographs.

Atelier EXB (Editions Xavier Barral) issues English and French editions and AKAAKA the Japanese one. Tomo Kosuga, director of the Masahisa Fukase Archives, wrote the texts and supervised the book, and Simon Baker, director of the Maison Européenne de la Photographie, contributes an introduction. It is a hardcover with 350 colour and black-and-white photographs. The series include Memories of Father, the pictures of his cat Sasuke, Bukubuku, self-portraits taken in a bathtub with a waterproof camera, and Berobero, paired self-portraits touching tongues, which he later coloured.

Fukase (Hokkaido, 1934 to 2012) was one of the most radical photographers of Japan's post-war generation. He worked almost exclusively in series, some of which ran for decades. A fall in 1992 left him with permanent brain damage, and much of his archive surfaced only after his death. His work has been shown at MoMA, the Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain and the Victoria and Albert Museum, and is held by the V&A, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Getty.