“From Window” by Masahisa Fukase, a photographer who took photos of his wife leaving their apartment building almost every day (1974)
His then wife, Yoko Wanibe said about the time they spent together (from 1963 till 1976), that there were moments of “suffocating dullness interspersed by violent and near suicidal flashes of excitement."
When Yoko left him in 1976, Fukase began drinking heavily and suffered bouts of debilitating depression. In the immediate months after her departure, he photographed ravens he saw at train stations on his way home to Hokkaido with the same single-minded intensity that he had photographed her.
Yoko left Fukase soon after these pictures were made and cited photography as a barrier that came between them. “In the ten or so years of our marriage,” she wrote in 1973, “he has only seen me through the lens of a camera, never without. And in fact what he saw through the lens was not me, but nothing other than himself.”
Yoko was just the longest in many failed relationships, and after each relationship breakdown, Fukase would experience an existential crisis that questioned his very being. “Taking photographs does not make you a photographer, and living doesn’t make you alive. At the end of the day, who am I, really?” he wrote.
