Edition : First / Tokyo / Asahi Sonorama / 1978 / Softcover. / Near Fine / VG+ 4to, Unpaginated (ca 120pp). Black boards in Dustwrapper. Text in English and Japanese. Sunning to spine.
Though published in a reasonable print run- supplies of Fukase’s Yohko dried up many years ago, in part due to the success and popularity of Ravens, and partly through it’s own merits as a standalone photobook. Yohko was published 2 years after their divorce, and is much about loss as about the joys of life. Fukase shot her as a primary subject over 13 years, to the point of violent obsession. Yoko herself described their life together as ‘suffocating dullness interspersed by violent and near suicidal flashes of excitement’. The narrative of the images are really a collaboration, as she is very much complicit and often posing for the camera, and it’s a beautiful and almost biographical piece of work, albeit heavily edited. It is of course now common knowledge that Ravens was shot in the aftermath of the divorce, and some of the earliest images appear here, pre-dating the standalone book by 8 years.
