Ravens

Ravens is Masahisa Fukase's series of photographs of crows along the Hokkaido coast, first published as a book in 1986 and reissued by MACK in 2017 as a bilingual facsimile of that first edition.

MACK says the work was made in the years after Fukase's divorce and was apparently set off by a mournful train journey to his hometown. The pictures are dark and impressionistic, with flocks of crows over coastal landscapes, and the work has been interpreted as an allegory of postwar Japan. The two later editions of the original book were short print runs that sold out immediately. This edition adds a new text by Tomo Kosuga of the Masahisa Fukase Archives. It is a debossed linen hardback of 148 pages in a silkscreened slipcase, 26.3 x 26.3 cm, with 80 tritone plates and 13 colour plates.

MACK notes that Fukase came to identify himself with the raven, and that this grew into a solitary existence. In 1992 he fell down the stairs of his favourite bar and spent the last twenty years of his life in medical isolation. He died in 2012. His earlier books include Yugi (Homo Ludence) (1971) and Yoko (1978), and he won the 2nd Ina Nobuo Award.