In 1973, Seiichi Furuya left Japan for Europe on board of the Trans-Siberian train. He arrived in Austria where he first settled in Vienna, before moving to Graz where he met Christine Gössler in 1978. From this day forward, he started photographing her, in the intimacy of their home in Graz but also during their travels abroad — to Germany, England, Italy…and Japan, their most distant destination. Christine studied art history and worked for the radio, making documentary programs. After the birth of their son in 1981, she became increasingly involved in the world of theatre. As she was devoting herself to her acting lessons, she started to show signs of schizophrenia. Christine committed suicide in East Berlin in 1985.
Seiichi Furuya found super 8 film rolls in his attic. One of them was a recording of the very first trip he made with Christine, in Bologna in 1978 a few weeks after they had met. As an attempt to remember a trip he had completely forgotten about, Seiichi Furuya started extracting stills from the film, frame by frame. These images compose his new series First Trip to Bologna 1978. Together with this series, in the same book, we are releasing a newly edited version of Last Trip to Venice 1985, which was first self-published in 2002. This series presents photographs from Seiichi and Christine’s very last trip, before Christine took her own life.
Publisher’s Info
Book Specs: First Trip to Bologna 1978 / Last Trip to Venice 1985 by Seiichi Furuya published by Chose Commune | Editorial direction: Cécile Poimboeuf-Koizumi | Design: Bureau Kayser | Softcover otabind | 16,5 x 24,4 cm | 192 pages 122 film stills 39 photographs | English / French / Japanese / German | Publication date: 10 March 2022 | ISBN : 979-10-96383-29-0. Available here.
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Seiichi Furuya: *1950 in Izu, Japan, lives in Graz, Austria
The work of Seiichi Furuya − the Japanese photographer now living in Graz, Austria − revolves as intensely as ever around the figure of his wife Christine, as he selects new images of her and continually rearranges and re-issues these images. In addition to numerous exhibitions, under the collective title Mémoires five artist’s books have been released since 1989, all of which are dedicated to the memory of his wife − a visual labor to preserve her memory. Face to Face was published by Chose Commune in 2020.
Since 1975, Furuya has had numerous exhibitions, both in Europe and overseas, at such venues as Forum Stadtpark and Camera Austria, Graz, Fotomuseum Winterthur, Albertina, Vienna, and Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. -> Galerie Thomas Fischer
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