Masahisa Fukase

"In The Solitude of Ravens Masahisa Fukase's work can be deemd to have reached its supreme height; it can also be said to have fallen to its greatest depth ... If we attempted to peek any further into the abyss of solitude revealed ... we would probably end up being abstracted in to a side-sweeping storm or else into a flock of ravens covering the sky."--Akira Hasegawa

"Hibi was one of Masahisa Fukase's final bodies of work. Fukase photographed street cracks and fissures between 1990 and 1992, and then hand painted a set of 10 x 8" bromide prints. The series was shown in February 1992, in his solo exhibition 'Private Scenes '92' held at the Nikon Salon in Tokyo, alongside Private Scenes, Bukubuku, and Berobero. His working life came to an end four months later, when he fell down the stairs in Shinjuku Golden Gai, Tokyo, and suffered brain damage."--Colophon.

From darkly fascinating photographs of ravens to humorous self-portraits, Fukase created images of enormous emotional power Among the most radical and original photographers of his generation, Masahisa Fukase was famous for The Solitude of Ravens(1991), in which these birds of doom, in flocks or alone, blacken the pages of the book in inky, somber, calligraphic clusters; in 2010 it was voted the best photobook of the past 25 years by the British Journal of Photography. Fukase also has a lesser-known corpus of collages, self-portraits, photographs reworked as sketches, black-and-white prints, Polaroids and more. This book brings together all of his work for the very first time. Its editors, Simon Baker, director of the Maison européenne de la photographie, Paris, and Tomo Kosuga, director of the Masahisa Fukase Archives, Tokyo, have assembled 26 series from Fukase's oeuvre, including Memories of Father; The Solitude of Ravens; his portraits of cats; his famous self-portraits taken in a bathtub with a waterproof camera; and many previously unpublished works. Fukase tried his hand at everything, and this essential volume, at more than 400 pages, at last reveals the full breadth of his imagination in an English-language publication.

A woman discovers something toxic at work in the isolated village where she is apprenticing as a pharmacist, in this fable-like novel about power, surveillance, prescriptions, and cures by a captivating debut voice. On a remote mountaintop somewhere in Europe, accessible only by an ancient funicular, a small pharmacy sits on a square. As if attending confession, townspeople carry their ailments and worries through its doors, in search of healing, reassurance, and a witness to their bodies and their lives. One day, a young woman arrives in the town to apprentice under its charismatic pharmacist, August Malone. She slowly begins to lose herself in her work, lulled by stories and secrets shared by customers and colleagues. But despite her best efforts to avoid thinking and feeling altogether, as her new boss rises to the position of mayor, she begins to realize that something sinister is going on around her. The Weak Spot is a fable about our longing for cures, answers, and an audience--and the ways it will be exploited by those who silently hold power in our world.

For the past thirty years, Japanese photographer Naoya Hatakeyama has undertaken a photographic examination of the life of cities and the built environment. Naoya Hatakeyama: Excavating the Future City is the first English-language survey on this renowned Japanese photographer; his work will be introduced by his own writings, as well as in-depth essays by Yasufumi Nakamori, Toyo Ito, and Philippe Forest.

Epic in scope, intimate in detail, heartbreaking in its human drama, Former People is the first book to recount the history of the nobility caught up the maelstrom of the Bolshevik Revolution and the creation of Stalin’s Russia. It is a book filled with chilling tales of looted palaces, burning estates, of desperate flights in the night from marauding bands of thugs and Red Army soldiers, of imprisonment, exile, and execution. It is the story of how a centuries’-old elite famous for its glittering wealth, its service to the empire, its promotion of the arts and culture, was dispossessed and destroyed along with the rest of old Russia. Drawing on the private archives of two great families – the Sheremetovs and the Golitsyns – it is also a story of survival and accommodation, of how many of the tsarist ruling class, so-called 'former people', managed to find a place for themselves and their families in the hostile world of the Soviet Union. It reveals, too, how even at the darkest depths of the terror, daily life went on - men and women fell in love, children were born, friends gathered. Ultimately, Former People is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit.