Art as Silence and Solitude
Ravens, Masahisa Fukase. Photo masahisafukase.com.
The sweetness of having nothing to say, the right to have nothing to say — such is the condition from which anything rare or rarefied that deserves a little being said is formed. Byung-Chul Han, in Psychopolitics
My photography does not concern itself with the exterior. It forgoes truth, the real thing, and uses the sensible only to, crudely, deceive memory. Incapable of translating the invisible, it only disguises imperfection in veiled form. Thus my photography deals with the interior. And being unable to become language, it is merely speculation. A speculation that can become obsessive because it is powerless.
In 1975, on a trip from Tokyo to Hokkaido, his native land, Masahisa Fukase began photographing the crows he could see from the train window — crows in motion, or perched on poles, telephone wires, or chimneys. It was the start of an obsessive journey that would last more than ten years. In 1986 that obsession produced Ravens, perhaps the most acclaimed photobook ever.
I mention Fukase for two reasons. Because he is one of my favorite photographers (alongside Daidō Moriyama, Takuma Nakahira, Shōmei Tōmatsu, among others) and because he avoided traditional notions of portraiture and documentary, creating an impressionistic narrative that fuses the deeply personal (his desperate interior) and the allegorical (the collective trauma of postwar Japan). In 1982, in his diary, Fukase said he had himself become a crow (recall that Fukase suffered a great heartbreak after his wife Yoko left him).
What I seek in photography is not pretty flowers or idyllic landscapes. Not perfect portraits or flawless focus. Not sunrise or sunset. It is the shadows and the other lights. It is the crows. I photograph through the distorted lens of life, for to me art seizes, disturbs, unsettles, transforms, causes suffering. Perhaps for that reason I use Fukase’s original title, The Solitude of Ravens. My art needs silence and solitude.
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