CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 9/19/2018

From darkness to the full power of the sun: Masahisa Fukase

Featured spreads are from Editions Xavier Barral's beautiful 416-page monograph on Japanese photographer Masahisa Fukase—best known for his influential 1991 black-and-white photobook, The Solitude of Ravens, and yet shown here to have been an artist of amazing range. Though he was known to have "expressed himself in darkness," Simon Baker writes, he turns out, "on closer inspection to have had a wildly playful nature, burning with the full power of the sun's rays when the mood took him. And while Fukase may have been defined by Ravens since its publication—in the public eye at least—his career long before this milestone was defined by powerfully experimental and boundary-challenging work that bridged documentary practice, surrealism, performance and autobiography, often all within a single image."