Ravens is one of PHotoEspaña’s star exhibitions. The author was in the process of marital separation. From the train windows, and from the stations and winter landscapes, he began to photograph crows
The last part of the life of Masahisa Fukase It must have been a whirlwind, similar to a blizzard in his series Ravens (crows, or karasu in Japanese), one of the star exhibitions of this edition of PHotoEspaña. The photographer was in the process of marital separation, broken inside, and tried to console himself with a trip to Hokkaido, in the north of Japan. From the train windows, and from the stations and winter landscapes, he began to photograph crows. He flirted with alcoholism, fell down some stairs one bad day and spent the last 20 years of his life in a coma.bedridden in a hospital.
Knowing the end of the story, Karasu has an even better perspective. more intimate, more gothic and sadder than it must have seemed in the long decade that Fukase spent photographing the series, between 1975 and 1986. The crow, herald of death, pet of the witch, representative of the sinister, but also lonely and depressing, was the photographer. And we were all the crow. Those who turn the cherry blossom festival into a dumping ground for filth. The crow can be the outside world, or the inside. It can be whatever we want it to be.
The girl’s hair flying in the wind, a schoolgirl with her friends, is also a crow. The beggar seen from behind, with a kind of filthy cape, too. The confusing traces, crossed in all directions, may be the inner chaos of Fukase or the marks on his soul. Other times eyes shine, a few or hundreds of them, which could have inspired some of the most sinister vignettes of Mike Mignola.
Those photos of luminous eyes, mostly blurry, have their technical difficulty, contrary to what it may seem. Fukase often used a strobe flash to better control the light illuminating his crow scenes.. Sometimes they were photos taken at midnight, with his Nikon F1 or his Pentax, which required very complicated printing.
The feathers of the crows are black and shiny, like the hair of girls. The photo is stolen from a ferry, while the schoolgirls look at the shore and the wind blows their hair. The crow, a scavenger, moves among garbage, like the homeless man with his cape. The crow is dark, like the train stations in the Hokkaido winter. The cawing of dozens of crows stationed on a tree is frightening and a symbol of bad omens. -Hitchcock already showed it-as bad as the health of Fukase’s soul in those dramatic moments of his life.
URJC professor Lorenzo Torres, one of the curators of the exhibition, had the idea of bringing the series Ravens to Spain last year, during a work stay in Japan in which he was able to see the collections of the Tokyo Museum of Photography: “When I arrived there there was a Fukase retrospective, and after studying his work I had no doubt that Ravens I had to come to Spain,” he explains. The following was a small odyssey to contact the foundation that owns and authorizes any action related to Fukase’s work, which is based in Amsterdam.
That’s how he met Tomo Kosugathe other curator of the exhibition, with whom he selected the series and the copies that can be seen until September 8 at the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid. The photographs on display are digital prints made from the originals, which are already years old.. In addition, there has been a lot of difficulty in getting the tones (everything is black and white) that would satisfy the Japanese curator as it more closely resembles the original material.
And the cat, what does a cat look like? It may be the crow’s companion in a magician’s laboratory or, more prosaically, another specimen of urban fauna. Here we have pigeons and also imported parrots; in other places they have crows. But no, it is the Japanese commissioner who reveals the reason for the cat, when he shows a portrait of Fukase himself on his cell phone: they have a certain resemblance. Like the owners who end up looking like their dogs, the cat and Fukase have an air, perhaps in their eyes, or their gesture, and the creature is so fat that he doesn’t look like a stray. Even in those moments of bitterness, the photographer exudes some humor. Other of his series could have a funny point, although this is not the case, but something always remains.
Ravens, in its day, became a cult photobook, selected in 2010 by a group of experts as the best of the previous 25 years. The series was also published in magazines and, in fact, Torres remembers, it became a series thanks to the editor of one of them, the one who published the first photographs: “He told him: ‘This could be something more. Why don’t you continue photographing crows?'”, and so on, Fukase He continued for 11 years, until making the most representative series of his career, as María Santoyo, the director of PHotoEspaña, described it during the presentation of the exhibition.
