Masahisa Fukase

While the life (and death) of Masahisa Fukase is arguably one of photography's most tragic stories, the resulting body of work is also one of its most powerful. After studying art in Tokyo and a brief career in commercial photography, in 1961 he exhibited his first series, "Kill the Pig," featuring images of a slaughterhouse, nudes taken with his first wife, and a portrait of their stillborn baby taken against her wishes. This exhibition marked the end of his first relationship and the beginning of his artistic career.

He quickly began a passionate relationship with another woman, Yohko, whom he photographed every morning from her window. In this famous series, we see Yohko over the years, becoming less and less joyful, announcing the separation she would impose on him after ten years of a tumultuous relationship. Deeply affected, Masahisa Fukase returned to his native Hokkaido, in northern Japan, and compulsively photographed crows, making these black birds a true symbol of his solitude and the depression he was going through. Among his varied, personal, but also experimental series, "The Solitude of Ravens" remains his most famous. Between 1974 and 1976, he collaborated with Araki Nobuyoshi, Tōmatsu Shōmei, Hosoe Eikō and Moriyama Daidō at the now legendary Workshop photography school.

In 1992, while leaving a bar, a fall left him in a coma for twenty years. He eventually died in 2012. Yohko visited him continuously during this time.