A tender and joyful portrait of cat companionship from the author of
The Solitude of Ravens
In 1977, photographer Masahisa Fukase turned his lens toward a new
companion: his cat, Sasuke. "That year I took a lot of pictures crawling
on my stomach to be at eye level with a cat and, in a way, that made me
a cat. It was a job full of joy, taking these photos playing with what I
liked, in accordance with the changes of nature." A year later, he
acquired a second cat, named Momoe. "I didn't want to photograph the
most beautiful cats in the world but rather capture their charm in my
lens, while reflecting me in their pupils," he wrote of these images.
"You could rightly say that this collection is actually a
'self-portrait' for which I took the form of Sasuke and Momoe."
Featuring tipped-on cover images, this gorgeously made book is arranged
in four chapters, organized around the chronology of Fukase's life with
his cats. As so often in his work, these tender images also express the
photographer's subjectivity and his connection to his subject.
Born in 1934 on the island of Hokkaido, in the north of Japan, into a
family of studio photographers, Masahisa Fukase was meant to take
over the family business, but instead he launched a career as a
freelance reporter in the late 1960s. In 1971 he published his first
photography book, dedicated to his family. In 1974, he cofounded the
Workshop Photography School with Shomei Tomatsu, Eikoh Hosoe, Noriaki
Yokosuka, Nobuyoshi Araki and Daido Moriyama. That same year, MoMA
dedicated a milestone exhibition New Japanese Photography to their
work; but it was the 1986 book The Solitude of Ravens that was to make
Fukase a revered photographer worldwide. After a fall in 1992, Fukase
went into a coma at the age of 58 and was kept on life support until his
death in 2012.
