Kikan Shashin Eizo / The Photo Image issue Number 2

First Edition, 1969. Book measures 7.25 x 10.25 inches. Text in Japanese. Gravure printed.

Book measures 7.25 x 10.25 inches. Text in Japanese. Gravure printed. Issue number 2 of Kikan Shashin Eizō (The Photo Image) which ran for just ten issues between 1969 and 1971, yet briefly gathered many of the era’s more radical photographers onto the same platform, and is now often seen as a snapshot of Japanese photography on the verge of the 1970s. This issue is devoted entirely to Masahisa Fukase under the heading “Masahisa Fukase Works - Kyō (Evil)”. The section falls into three layers: a black-and-white sequence, a following color sequence, and an essay at the end titled “Doro-mamire no Zāmen” (“Semen Covered in Mud”) which reads like a written confession for the work as a whole. It moves from childhood memories of wartime fur-collection and the slaughterhouse to family life, marriage, sexual encounters and a brief stay in Shinjuku, its tone oscillating between self-mockery and resentment. The final line—“These modest clusters of images are trembling inside Kyō”—pulls the slaughterhouse, the butoh body and the photographer’s own private history back under a single title. Seen within Fukase’s broader timeline, Kyō in this issue of Kikan Shashin Eizō feels like an over-concentrated solution. The quarterly itself disappeared quickly, but this feature remains as a rare, sharply cut cross-section of both Fukase’s practice and that particular moment in Japanese photography.

A well-preserved copy in showing only minimal signs of rubbing to wrappers. Binding is square and intact. Near Fine