Face To Face by Seiichi Furuya & Christine Gössler

A collection of works by Japanese photographer Seiichi Furuya and his wife Christine Gössler.

"No matter how many times I tried, I realized I couldn't understand anything" - in 2010, Furuya literally put an end to the "Mémoires" series that he had been working on for nearly 20 years. However, after suffering a stroke just before the "Last Memoire" exhibition and not even being able to visit the venue, Furuya was asked to create an exhibition to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the founding of a certain art museum in Japan in 2019, and there, as the final chapter of "Last Memoire," he decided to weave together "Mémoires" centered on Christine as an artist.

In 2018, Furuya began sorting through Christine's belongings that had been left in the attic for decades. In the process of discovering various documents there, Furuya came across a slide film of Christine standing behind a tripod while he was taking her best-known portrait, taken on the coast of Nishiizu, his hometown. Furuya was so excited at the time that he muttered, "Face to Face..." As he investigated the documents further, he discovered that they had been taking pictures of each other until the day before Christine took her own life in October 1985.

"Face to Face" begins with a photograph of Christine taken on February 28, 1978 in Furuya's apartment in Graz where he was living at the time, and ends with a photograph of her and Komyo taken on October 6, 1985, with the Cecilienhof Palace in the background, the site of the Potsdam Conference in 1945 where the leaders of the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union discussed the aftermath of World War II. All but one of the 150 photographs included in this book are photographs of Christine and Furuya themselves. For Furuya, the act of photographing Christine was not to produce a print as an artwork, but rather the act itself strangely held a meaning like a silent dialogue. With this photobook, Furuya marks the end of his lifelong work on "Mémoires."

-

Title: Face to Face
Artist: Seiichi Furuya
Chose Commune, 2020
Hardcover, perfect binding
255 x 206 x 19 mm
168 pages
Text in English and French
First edition
ISBN: 979-10-96383-19-1