As the first Japanese retrospective of Masahisa Fukase opens, we unpack his obsessive oeuvre.
As quickly as Masahisa Fukase found new subjects to shoot, he lost them. As if by a process of elimination, the Japanese photographer ended up being his only subject. In 1989, at the age of 55, Masahisa began travelling through new and familiar landscapes, documenting himself as a strange shadow-presence intruding into the frame. In 1992, these snapshots found their way onto the black walls of Ginza Nikon Salon in Tokyo, where Masahisa staged a flabbergasting show consisting of 444 overlapped proto-selfies - or, as he called them, "piles of tombstones". A few months later, Masahisa, blind drunk, tumbled down the stairs of his favourite haunt and spent the next - and final - 20 years of his life in a coma.
