The cult book The Solitude Ravens is reprinted by Mack. Devoted to the figure of the bird, the Japanese photographer’s series is a cry of impossible grief.
Like a captive of the past that never passes. Like a passerby that never reaches the end of his journey. Like a solitary soul doomed to wander among gregarious souls, watching them with a muted howl of unspeakable suffering.
“I often played by following my grim friends,”Masahisa Fukase admitted in 1976, adding: “I became a raven with a camera.” He was then right in the middle of working on his masterpiece, The Solitude of Ravens. First published in 1984, the work quickly became a landmark in the history of photography. It is the fruit of a personal confession: the state of permanent mourning which seemed to engulf the photographer.
Dark stars
The first photograph that catches your attention as you open the book is a close-up of a raven that lifts its claw to its beak, as if beckoning you to turn the page. If you do, the ephemeral will be your constant companion, gone for a moment only to return the next as the inhabitant of a page, piercing you with its mysterious eye before it takes off again.
Masahisa Fukase was obsessed with that bird. He photographed it up close, from afar, on its own, in groups. He would catch it at night, perched on a tree, its eyes suddenly glinting in the light of the flash. He photographed a winged cloud splintering the sky, swarming like a milky way of dark stars. With this black-and-white work, sometimes blurred, other times sharp and clear, the raven’s nocturnal plumage stands out against snowy landscapes, urban backgrounds, and forests. The photographer keeps strange, mystical company.
The crier of duty
As if by grief, the solitary walker Fukase is pursued by the raven. It alights wherever it desires: on electric wires, tree branches, rooftops. Even when the bird is not in the image, it seems to be there. In the picture of the two young women looking at the sea, their hair is ruffled by a gust of wind like feathers of a bird taking flight. Fukase’s book is an ode to this figure that we associate with death. In his poem, The Crows, Arthur Rimbaud wrote:
By thousands, over the fields of France,
Where sleep the dead of yesterday,
Turn about in the winter, won’t you,
So that each passer-by may remember!
By then the crier of duty,
O our funereal black bird![2]
The crier of duty brings us, too, face to face with ghosts of the past. In the photographs collected in The Solitude of Ravens, there is a clear link with Japanese history. When Fukase catches the silhouette of a commercial airplane, we think of Japanese kamikaze pilots during the Second World War. The plane also evokes American bombings that laid cities in ruin before dropping two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Fukase’s raven thus becomes a symbol of the deadly violence punctuating the history of his country: the Japanese invasion of China, the samurai tradition, the art of Harakiri… In one photograph, a homeless man is seated in the middle of a terrain vague strewn with trash. He brings to mind a stunned pilot who’d just survived a plane crash and is sitting surrounded by the debris of his machine.
Nevermore
The photograph of the homeless man is that of an individual feeling overwhelmed and dejected after a disaster, suffering from spleen that follows the intoxication with ideal. Spleen finds its most loyal companion in the raven — melancholy incarnate. In Edgar Alan Poe’s celebrated poem, doesn’t the bird say, “Nevermore”? Its only utterance affirms what the speaker in them poem refuses to hear: the passage of time, loss, the loss of a loved one, and eventually his own death. In Fukase’s work, the raven seems be the image of this permanent mourning. It expresses perhaps what any human being may feel: the indignation with dying, the feeling of outrage at the human condition that makes us all perish one day.
In the series, there is one photograph that seems to howl. It shows a depopulated seascape. There is not a single ship or swimmer in sight. Not a single raven, either. But there is fog. The photographer makes it seem as if smoke were rising from the surface of the water, as if the sea were on fire. The photograph makes one think of volcanic ash, the epitome of all the fears of the Japanese who live under the constant menace of mount Fuji. The image also resembles the very last canvas by Vincent Van Gogh, entitled Wheatfield with Crows. Here it is again, the ephemeral… In reference to that painting, Antonin Artaud said in his essay Van Gogh: The Man Suicided by Society: “Rich, sumptuous, and calm. Worthy accompaniment to … death …”[3] These words could serve as the preface to The Solitude of Ravens.
Jean-Baptiste Gauvin
Jean-Baptiste Gauvin is a journalist, writer, and stage director. He lives and works in Paris.
Masahisa Fukase, Ravens
Republished by Mack
€80.00 £75.00 $85.00
[1] ‘Mainichi Shimbunsha’, Camera Mainichi (Nov. 1976), quoted in Tomo Kosuga, ‘Cries of Solitude’, in Ravens (Mack, 2017).
[2] Arthur Rimbaud, ‘The Crows’, in Rimbaud: Complete Works, Selected Letters. A Bilingual Edition, ed. and trans. Wallace Fowlie, rev. Seth Whidden (University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 197. – Trans.
[3] Antonin Artaud, ‘Van Gogh: The Man Suicided by Society’ (1947), in Selected Writings, trans. (University of California Press, 1988), p. 490. – Trans.
