The Solitude of Ravens. Karasu. Photographs by Masahisa Fukase. Rat Hole Gallery, 2008. 136 pp. Large quarto. Limited edition of 1000 copies. Clothbound. No jacket as issued. Card slipcase. Black and white reproductions. Very good plus in a very good plus slipcase.

A stunning limited edition reprint of this now classic title. Now quite scarce.

In her afterword, Akira Hasegawa writes: "The depth of solitude in Masahisa Fukase's photographs makes me shudder". One can see what she means. It is a darkly fascinating and obsessive work that lodges in the mind.

Fukase's images are grainy, dark and impressionistic. Often, he magnifies his negatives or overexposes them, aiming all the time for mood over technical refinement. He photographs flocks from a distance, and single birds that appear like black silhouettes against grey, wintry skies. They are captured in flight, blurred and ominous, and at rest, perching on telegraph wires, trees, fences and chimneys. Fukase photographs them alive and dead, and maps their shadows in harsh sunlight and their tracks in the snow. Although the visual narrative is punctuated by other mysterious images – a nude, fleshy masseuse, a malevolent-looking cat, windswept girls peering over a boat rail, a homeless man drinking in what looks like a municipal rubbish tip – it is the ravens that obsess Fukase. His vision is so stark, so relentlessly monochrome, that you cannot help but wonder what kind of hold they had on his imagination. Ultimately, though, it seems that Fukase's 10-year pursuit of the ravens was a way of trying to make sense of an altogether more personal emotional trauma. In an essay entitled The Art of Losing Love, the author Oborn notes: "Fukase's best-known work was made while reeling from loss of love." She points out that Fukase began his pursuit of the ravens just after Yoko, his wife of 13 years, left him. "While on a train returning to his hometown of Hokkaido, perhaps feeling unlucky and ominous," she writes, "Fukase got off at stops and began to photograph something which in his culture and in others represents inauspicious feeling: ravens. He became obsessed with them, with their darkness and loneliness." The Solitude of Ravens, then, is a book of mourning. Yoko, tellingly, was Fukase's main subject before he turned his camera on the ravens.

Fukase was born in 1934 and belonged to a generation of Japanese photographers who came to prominence in the long psychological shadow cast by their country's defeat in the war. In the late 1950s, he worked in advertising to fund his artistic projects, which included two celebrated series of darkly graphic pictures, Oil Refinery Skies (1960) and Kill the Pigs (1961), the latter a brutal depiction of a slaughterhouse. In the mid-70s, he set up a school called the Workshop alongside Shomei Tomatsu and Daido Moriyama, both of whom have since become internationally celebrated.

Fukase, according to Yoko, was an intense and obsessive character despite the joyousness of the images he made of her. She described their life together as moments of "suffocating dullness interspersed by violent and near suicidal flashes of excitement." After they split up, he suffered from bouts of depression and heavy drinking. "I work and photograph while hoping to stop everything," he once said. "In that sense, my work may be some kind of revenge drama about living now."

In Japanese mythology, ravens are disruptive presences and harbingers of dark and dangerous times – another reason, perhaps, why the photographer was drawn to them during his darkest hour. In 1992, five years after the book was published, Fukase fell down a flight of stairs in a bar. He has been in a coma ever since. His former wife, now remarried, visits him in hospital twice a month. "With a camera in front of his eye, he could see; not without," she told an interviewer. "He remains part of my identity; that's why I still visit him."

None of this should impinge on a critical reading of Fukase's work, which is powerful and affecting even if you come upon it, as I did, without knowing anything of the biographical background that underpins it. Nevertheless, it is now hard for me to separate his life and his photographs. "In Ravens, Fukase's work can be deemed to have reached its utmost height and to have fallen to its greatest depth," writes Hasegawa in her poetic, unflinching afterword.

It remains Fukase’s most powerful work, and a kind of epitaph for a life that has been even sadder and darker than the photographs suggest.

"Arguably the post-Provoke masterpiece of Japanese photobooks," write Parr & Badger of this book's original Japanese edition. Fukase's work share's with Provoke "a similar combination of the intensely personal with the metaphorical, another allegory for the state of the country...The raven is a symbol of ill-omen in Japan as in the West...But if Karasu is a bitter indictment of the industrialized country, dehumanized and picked over by the natural scavengers of capitalism, the skies heavy with pollution, it is also a superb demonstration of how the photobook can also deal with the private...Fukase's cry of despair is perhaps one of the most romantic photobooks...The imagery is beautiful, surprising, haunting, but ultimately it is Fukase's masterly handling of the narrative and rhythm that makes it so memorable."      

Very good plus in a very good plus slipcase. Minimal wear to cloth. Internally, clean and bright. Handled with great care. Perhaps unread. Like new. Slipcase has minimal wear. 

Scarce.