The Centre de la photographie de Mougins presents Fushikaden by Japanese photographer Issei Suda.
The harsh and belligerent light of summer bathes the street scenes in Fushikaden, the most iconic series by Japanese photographer Issei Suda. The images were taken in Tokyo, where he lives, but also and especially in the more distant provinces of Tohoku, Hokuriku, and Kanto, where he traveled during the 1970s to witness the matsuri, traditional popular festivals that are half religious, half secular.
The archipelago was healing the wounds of World War II and the American occupation, and facing dazzling growth, becoming the world’s second largest economy in just a few years. The march is forced, and time was running out to capture the daily life of a country grappling with a major identity crisis, between deep-rooted tradition and the hysteria of modernity.
Issei Suda began his career as a photographer with Shuji Terayama’s experimental theatre troupe Tenjo Sajiki in 1967, before starting to work as a freelance photographer in 1971. While he borrowed his title Fushikaden from the theory of traditional Noh theatre, Suda, born in 1940, was nourished by Hollywood cinematic writing and the films of Orson Welles.
Nationally distributed photography magazines expanded their audience, sharpened the appetite for novelty, and embraced the frenzy of images. Amateurs and professionals competed for prizes and competitions. Far more than the nonexistent or precarious institutions—museums and galleries—it is there, in the magazines, that the country’s photographic history was written and thought about in the present.
Before becoming a book, Fushikaden was published as a rensai, a series of eight portfolios, in issues of Kamera Mainichi that ran from December 1975 to December 1977. Suda’s success was immediate, and the publisher Asahi Sonorama published the book Fushikaden in 1978, with a selection of 100 photographs instead of the 138 initially chosen by Suda. It was not until 2012 that Akio Nagasawa published the entire series, 34 years after its first publication.
Several avant-garde movements coexisted at this time, some marked by a strong political and documentary commitment, or others, like that carried by the magazine Provoke, promoting more expressive and experimental photographic forms: blur, grain, the brutal explosion of contrasts revealing the subjectivity of their authors and the difficulty of describing the paradoxes of this new world. Alongside them, Issei Suda, a shy but above all deeply independent man, appeared to be a free electron and embraced the photographic medium in a more classical way, apparently.
His square photographs, taken with a Rolleiflex, with precise framing and stripped of obvious graphic effects, depict street scenes and portraits. He captured his contemporaries with a radical perspective imbued with poetry and humor.
While his photographs can sometimes be reminiscent of surrealist or humanist photography, these Western references struggle to capture the complexity of his compositions and the centuries-old culture they represent.
The painted face of a Kabuki actor, the body of a woman on the beach, children walking to school, improbable or rigid postures, closed eyes… the photographer paid keen attention to life’s insignificant details.
The moments he chose are also his own, as if they came, just after or just before, to capture the abnormal pulse of an unstable and strange reality, of a humanity that stutters. He plucked, in the ordinary and the banal, the sublime that escapes us.
Exhibition curated by:
Jérôme Sother, François Cheval, and Yasmine Chemali.
Exhibition produced in partnership with the GwinZegal Art Center, Guingamp, and the Akio Nagasawa Gallery, Tokyo.
Issei Suda: Fushikaden
From March 8 to June 8, 2025
Centre de la photographie de Mougins
43 rue de l’Église, 06250 Mougins
04 22 21 52 12
www.centrephotographiemougins.com
Edition:
To mark this exhibition, Akio Nagasawa Publishing and GwinZegal are partnering to reissue the iconic book Fushikaden.
Akio Nagasawa Publishing & GwinZegal
Format: 22 × 21 cm, Softcover, 152 pages
ISBN: 979-10-94060-47-6
€30
On sale at the Photography Center shop.
