P11 - Defined Personal Practice Research
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Seichi Furuya - Graz - 1978
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The image above is taken from the Japanese photographer, Seichi Furuya's book of 1989 entitled, Mémoires which details the photographer's memories of his late wife, Christine Gossler, who died in 1985 after enduring a long and painful deterioration.
The book is constructed in a disparate photographic style with one image being a colour "snapshot" like so many that grace the albums of the average, western family and the next having the resemblance of heroic, Soviet propaganda in the mode of Rodchenko or the statuary of Vera Mukhina.
What is made clear however is that Christine, the sole subject of our attention, is fading with every consecutive image and though we may feel uncomfortable in viewing another's pain, the photographer is undeterred. The book, although concerned with the slow passage towards death is full of the incidents and motifs of a life shared.
Within my response to the P11 - Defined Personal Practice brief, I intend to reflect upon the visible signs and motifs of a life shared but through the objects left behind. My visual approach will also differ from that of Mémoires as my intention is not to create the feel of a family album constructed over a considerable time span. Rather I resolve to produce a coherent and analogous body of work that has the feel that it was photographed on the same day. This is because, rather than a sense of history - and therefore sentimentality - being present within the work, I intend it to always be immured in one specific moment of examination and reflection.
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