Seiichi Furuya Photography Exhibition

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	Seiichi Furuya Photography Exhibition Christine Furuya-Gössler, Mémoires 1978-1985 akihito yasumi

	Izu, 1978

	To press (= the word "cut" is used for this meaning in Japanese) the shutter release button... Seiichi Furuya's photographs relentlessly highlight this cruel aspect of shooting a photograph described in the ordinarily used Japanese language. The English word "shoot" also exposes cruelty in another meaning. Certainly, in photography, the act of shooting deals a destructive blow on abstract issues such as "image","scenery", and "story". It is a materialistic act of severing the familiar relationship between the subject and the object, and the view and the object. (Photography) can literally cut the connection with the other, also becoming the knife that hurts the other. Also, it is probably not a coincidence that this photographer, who totally excludes any lyrical vagueness even when his closest existence or his wife is the subject, and who deploys a sharp tension in his works that seems like a cutting knife, has taken up the theme of "severance" in his series such as "Border", in which he shot the border zone between Austria, where he lived, and the Eastern European nations, and the series, "Wall", where he shot the Berlin Wall from the Eastern side before its collapse. In these series, the importance lies not in the old fashioned melodrama of the tragedy in crossing the "boundary", but in the fact that the place is the remnant of a historical "severance".
	Graz, 1980
	In reality, his photographs which place repeated seals of severance on history, communicate the fact that definite boundaries do not exist, but on the other hand, they all too easily disappear, and the history of severance gradually becomes exposed to oblivion. In any way, is not a "work" given a start when a certain severance precedes it? The wife of Seiichi Furuya, Christine Furuya-Gössler, committed suicide by throwing herself off the 9th floor of an apartment in East Berlin, where she lived with her husband and son. Needless to say, "death" is the ultimate severance, but that impression becomes even stronger from the fact that it was not a gradual transfer from life to death, but a instantaneous act of a vertical fall of the body. From the point of that severance, the photographs take on an entirely different meaning for the photographer, who was forced to interrupt his work of recording the life of a woman close to himself. There is a paradox in which the photographs that were supposed to record the passing time fighting against oblivion, on the other hand, highlighted the momentary "passsage" called death. That is why, the work of mourning by the photographer who tried to "cut" the memories of her, will actually continue to let the dead "exist". We must reconsider the meaning of why the interest of Furuya's photography transfered from "cutting" to "extending" the severed section ever since the severance ocurred.
	Schattendorf, 1981
	Most of the approximately 400 portraits of his late wife shown in this exhibition were not printed while she was alive. Many were left untouched until 11 years after her death. This may mean that it took that much time for those images to appear as the "other" for the photographer, but the abandoned negatives of the photographs are also similar to the memories of plastic creations. In other words, the meaning which was not clear with the first experience (shooting), becomes clear for the first time when later, another event happens (printing=recalling), composing a new expereince where one would think "that has once happened".
	Wein, 1982
	At that time, what is enlarged together with the photograph is time, and each time, the pictures reorganize their unique perception formed over a long time. Seeing the photographs displayed chronologically as if reexperincing the 8 years from the encounter of the two until her death, one cannot have feelings or sentiments similar to that of an autobiographical novel; he cannot help flinching at the eyes that look straight towards him, and at the images which deny any wavering. What cannot be seen in reality due to "human" feelings are captured "outside" of time through the cruel eyes of the camera. The photographer's design of trying to regain them back in the flow of time, endlessly will remain in limbo between "cutting" and "enlarging". The style of this show where works are chronologically divided among 9 galleries also will give the viewer the opportunity to repeat the suturing of severed time.
	photos copyright(c): seiichi furuya

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