Ravens by Masahisa Fukase — MACK 2017 Bilingual Facsimile of Karasu
Ravens is the 2017 Mack Books facsimile of Masahisa Fukase's 1986 photobook Karasu — a sequence in which the raven functions not as ornithological subject but as a vehicle for grief, solitude, and self-projection. Produced as a bilingual edition in an embossed linen hardback housed in a silkscreened slipcase, this reprint returns the work to its original structure while adding a new essay by Tomo Kosuga.
About the Work
The photographs in Ravens were made in the years following Fukase's divorce from Yoko Wanibe, and are closely associated with a train journey back toward his home prefecture of Hokkaido. The sequence accumulates black wings, coastal light, and blurred distance into something that operates less as documentation than as a sustained internal state. The raven becomes a figure onto which isolation and loss are gradually projected — a formal strategy as much as a biographical one.
Printed across 80 tritone plates and 13 colour plates within 148 pages, the book's visual logic depends on tonal compression and the slow accumulation of a single motif. The tritone printing in this MACK edition sustains the tonal range that makes the sequence cohere. Tomo Kosuga's essay, included in both Japanese and English, situates the work within Fukase's broader biography and the conditions under which Karasu was first published in 1986.
Ravens holds a significant position in the history of the photobook medium — not because of its subject matter alone, but because of the precision with which Fukase bound a period of personal dissolution to a photographic form. The work is available in the Lokator100 Photobooks catalogue as a central reference point in post-war Japanese photography.
About the Publisher
This edition was produced by MACK Books, a London-based publisher known for its close attention to photobook production and its work with both historical and contemporary photographers. The 2017 facsimile of Karasu was produced with care for the original's physical format — square, substantial, and designed to be read as a sequence. Further titles from the publisher are available in the Mack Books collection at Lokator100.
About the Artist
Masahisa Fukase (1934–2012) was a Japanese photographer from Hokkaido and is regarded as one of the most radical figures of post-war Japanese photography. He worked in extended series, often turning his own life — family, marriage, animals, loss, and the self — into photographic form.
Though Ravens remains the work most closely tied to his name, Fukase's broader practice includes Family / Kazoku, SASUKE, From Window, Hibi, and numerous self-portraits. After a serious fall in 1992, he lived with permanent brain injury until his death in 2012; only afterwards did the archive begin to reopen more fully. A broader view of his output is available in the Masahisa Fukase 1961–1991 Retrospective.
