Cat photographs in four chapters
Sasuke collects Masahisa Fukase's long-running cat photographs into a single hardcover volume structured across four chapters. The book presents 115 images of two companions — Sasuke and Tomoe — photographed with a closeness that keeps the distance between subject and photographer in constant question. Repetition and proximity are the book's primary formal tools. The sequence accumulates rather than narrates.
The reading that positions Sasuke alongside Ravens as indirect self-portraiture is well-supported by the images. The cats' eyes function as reflective surfaces; the photographer's position stays insistently close. What the book tracks — across 192 pages — is less the animals themselves than the quality of attention Fukase brings to them: sustained, inward, and resistant to sentiment.
An essay by Tomo Kosuga of the Masahisa Fukase Archive is included. The text is in Japanese only. Published in 2021 by Akaaka Art Publishing, the book belongs to a body of photobooks in which form and autobiographical pressure are inseparable.
About the photographer
Masahisa Fukase (1934–2012) was a Japanese photographer whose work is defined by its psychological intensity and autobiographical orientation. He studied at Nihon University and developed a practice in which personal circumstance — isolation, attachment, rupture — became both subject and formal logic.
His series Ravens brought broad international recognition and remains a central reference in photobook history. Across his career, Fukase returned repeatedly to subjects close to him, treating the camera as an instrument of sustained, often dark introspection. In 1992 an accident left him in a coma; he remained so until his death in 2012.
