Purple Magazine
— Purple #43 S/S 2025
The Tokyo Diary Issue
masahisa fukase
Radical experimental photographer Masahisa Fukase (1934-2012) spent the last 20 years of his life in a coma, after tragically falling down a flight of stairs in a bar.
Fukase obsessively photographed everything around him and lived through the lens of the camera. For him, photography was a form of self-portraiture. His From Window series documented his wife leaving home for work every day, while his portraits of Japanese families included photographs of deceased relatives and partially nude family members. As part of his avant-garde approach, he sewed and punctured photographs he had developed, and rephotographed them.
Dealing with depression toward the end of his working life, he spent a decade photographing ravens, and published them in a successful book simply called Ravens (Karasu). His highly autobiographical body of work and archives were gradually made public after his death in 2012.
ALL PHOTOGRAPHS COPYRIGHT MASAHISA FUKASE ARCHIVES
