On October 7, 1985, the anniversary of the GDR, the wife of the Japanese photographer Seiichi Furuya was thrown from the window of his apartment in East Berlin. Since 1982, Christine Gössler began to show symptoms of schizophrenia. It took a few round trips in a psychiatric hospital Graz (where she had met and Furuya, 1978), Vienna (where she had begun to study drama, before abandoning them due to illness). Furuya, graduated from photography school in Tokyo since 1975 traveling between Vienna, Graz and East Berlin after a long post soixantehuitard trip aboard the Trans-Siberian Railway. One knows a little work today in the journal Camera Austria, where he must have been one of the first in Europe to show or Moryama Araki Daido, but when he met Christine in February 1978 Furuya was not living with his photos. He lived from odd jobs translations. Photograph was an attempt for him to see clearly, to translate the image by this silent Eastern bloc which appeared unbreakable: streets, of everyday perspectives and trams, collected with a gently ironic eye, stranger in a similar style of Gary Winogrand. Of course, a lot of his photos were portraits of this beautiful woman in the dark face and their little boy, Komiyo Klaus, born in 1981. Photos showing less than fronted the cities of Eastern Europe, as if no corner could never succeed in achieving this woman who gradually moved away from reality, he became foreign. The day before his suicide, Seiichi Furuya photographed the still, in a garden in autumn colors. His look at it that tries to hook the camera, but it obviously can not do it, the farewell is already endorsed. Suicide Christine bisects the book. The second half is completely haunted by his absence - they are the same buildings the same streets, the gardens themselves, the same sky, even the Communist bloc and yet still glaciation, but a piece missing, which upsets the architecture of the together. Silence does not replace it. Where is Christine? Splice by what she has escaped? At the exact
hyphenation of the book, as of April 7, 1985, found a contact sheet, you do not notice it right away, the photographs are too numerous, tiny, but one of them is seen a body pressed against the green grass, a patch of greenery amidst towers of concrete. We understand that this photo was taken from the window where the body even ejected. A photo does not enlarge Furuya, not expose. A picture that defies art, photography, life, understanding. We do not know what is happening in his head when he made this photo there at that time. We know, however, in which he has lived for empty, his art is barely concealing his pain under a false trivial - dozens of photos of a flat lifeless, dozens of photos of land and full of herbs that repel always a bit by erasing the traces, dozens of pictures of tanks, steps, all these festivals celebrating every 7 October 1 Republic meaningless, undecipherable condition promptly.
Seiichi Furuya, memoirs. 1984-1987 , Izu Photo / Camera Austria, Tokyo / Graz 2010
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