About 45 years ago, Masahisa Fukase made a book of pictures called Ravens as a way to, in part, process his divorce from his wife. The book is cacophonic as it primarily images ravens - singular, in groups, in stasis, and in frenzied flight. The pictures are all monochrome, 35mm, and a sort of grainy vision reflective of the Provoke group of Post War Japanese photographers. When a picture arises in Ravens that is not a picture of ravens, it punctuates the sequence in a way that it wouldn't otherwise. Much has been written about this book and for many deeply interested in photography books it is a canonical work - right there with Robert Frank's The Americans and Nan Goldin's Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Which is to say that, at least to some readers here, it may be so familiar and so foundational that I can fathom it may be taken for granted. 

Ravens reflects the emotions of a man going through a turbulent time and yet it is a canonical book because of its magnificent restraint; it is a very small premise exploded to maximum potential in depicting mostly birds and their environs in only black and white and shades of grey. 

The tension that the book displays is this mad, dark subject coupled with the almost singular, almost fixed and very much contained vision and is a feat that few artists ever achieve in any medium. Some time after Ravens was made, and after years of engaging with photography in different ways - using his family's large format portrait studio, intentionally misusing color emulsions for dramatic effect, venturing into mixed media in different ways - Fukase drunkenly fell down the stairs at a favorite watering hole and suffered a traumatic brain injury. He necessarily ceased making work before ceasing to live. As I peruse his oeuvre - creatively restless, experimental and urgent - this feels like a man who needed to create in order to breathe. I wonder if it’s more accurate to say that he ceased to live at the same moment he ceased making his work.

The interesting thing about Fukase was that until lately, in my awareness of him, his work was always and only Ravens. I don't own the book. Every time I looked to purchase it I found the cost to be prohibitive. I am not looking at it as I write. I write from memory of the experience of looking at it, of the feeling of awe I encountered as I closed the final pages, wondering how to comprehend the sequence I'd just traversed. 

(I had it in my hands once, about 18 months ago. A reprint - not the original edition. Memory is tricky, and my characterizations of the book may not completely correspond to what, in fact, is printed. Make of that what you will.) 

From this point on, I don’t think the words are about Ravens specifically. They are about a sort of disciplined photographic formalism (a cousin to slippery terms like style or vision as photographers like to discuss). It’s just that I think this idea is embodied by Ravens more successfully than just about anything else I’ve seen.

With my awareness of Ravens coming a bit late - some things slip through the cracks in my self-directed, continuing photographic education - it wasn't until recently (and rather cheaply, I suppose) that I settled on the idea that something is better than nothing. My local library lacking, I found a used version of Fukase's retrospective work for a much more affordable price that included excerpts from Ravens, as well as much more.

The timing of my receipt of Fukase’s retrospective last fall was perfect because it felt like it gave me license to pursue a little bit of photographic freedom that I’d deprived myself of in recent years. 

What do I mean by that?

Sometime in 2020 or thereabouts I began entertaining the idea of giving up color in my pictures, if not totally then mostly, and if not forever then at least for a good long while. This sounds simple enough but for me was a radical departure from how I'd been looking at the world for the last 15 years or so. For me photography was always a color medium. The moment of falling in love with the black and white darkroom process that is so common amongst many photographers was never really part of my experience. My early loves were the surrealistic pictures of David LaChapelle, the multi-light Provia and Velvia chrome captures at sunset in skateboarding magazines, and the prints of Eggleston’s famed Guide.

Before I go further I want to acknowledge that this whole premise might seem a little reductive and worn out. Monochrome and color photography, how much more basic does it get? This whole notion of color,  while in some way inextricable from the pictures whether it’s there or not, is usually considered baked into questions of content or concepts - and those things are usually more substantial. I get it. But right now this isn’t about content or concepts beyond the question of color. If you can, humor me and set it aside.

Part of the reason I considered the abandonment of color was that I was feeling like I was searching for a new photographic dialect for a new chapter in life and I've always found that even arbitrary limitations have the potential to give rise to progress. It was also that I was starting to lose trust in color photography as a medium - this before even generative AI images began widely circulating and eroding it further. 

I recall that I reasoned, however faultily, that black and white photography was a more established visual language - that there was probably a more common understanding that a black and white picture was of something real - because embellishment was almost always of a color world - and that if I focused more on speaking that language then the pictures I made would be seen in a certain way. The realness also derived from the fact that the picture’s lie was made apparent and immediate - in that it stripped the world of color. The viewer knows the disconnect immediately and can move past it to the content that remains. Most viewers have been trained to do this already, consciously or not. A color picture muddies those waters because it can purport to show the world that much more closely to how it is.

Beyond that, color pictures began to feel too seductive and too close to images that functioned commercially, politically, even propagandistically. The color digital cameras I used began to capture detail of scenes that I couldn’t even see while photographing. They became more like microscopes. The hyperreality of the files, the ease with which a perfectly beautiful rendition of something could be captured, began to feel almost grotesque. 

(Any time I write broadly about photography and its connection to reality I am painfully aware of all of the holes that can be punched into any one sentence and yet choices still must be made.)

Another reason I chose to forego working in color was that I felt the need to restrain and retrain my perception to something that was more consistent across time and space. I (regrettably) was not yet acquainted with Ravens until a few years later, but one reason it spoke to me when I first saw it was that I found it to be temperamentally perfect. A wild, active, emotional work so simply and concisely put. It became a north star of sorts; I would be happy to achieve even a sliver of what Fukase achieved in marrying the two forces. At that point I knew nothing of the time in his life, his motivations behind the work, nor the breadth of his oeuvre. I just knew that Ravens pierced like a lance. 

I've always been  sort of a formal experimentalist but I deeply value seeing a through line in an artist’s work, but thinking of this too narrowly can be a trap. There are different ways that this through line can manifest, ones that are more substantive than a consistent visual signature.  

Here’s what I mean: in the world of photography, there is the danger of achieving this rigor through tools above all else - above ideas, ideals and perception. To say nothing beyond the formal content of a picture, the current world of photography seems to reward a kind of aesthetic reproducibility. Many successful artists have readily identifiable visual signatures - stylistic formulas that are as much a reflection of technology used as they are the artist using it. 

In trying to be more concrete here - I mean that a visual signature is of course how a photographer frames the world but is also the result of a particular film or digital sensor, lens focal length, aperture setting, or imaging pipeline - from analog printing to hybrid analog-digital workflows to purely digital workflows with color rendering presets. All of these approaches affect the way a picture looks. 

In discussions of process, photographers often refer to their tools and such tools give rise to a certain interpretation of their images. On the internet we often can’t tell how a picture was made but if the photographer tells us they shoot with a large format camera, we will envision the landscape we see being made with the photographer patiently setting up, composing under a dark cloth, and paying substantially in materials and process for the production of a single picture, as opposed to holding their small digital camera up to their eye and clicking with a resulting cost that is insignificant. And to be clear, I believe the process itself does imbue a picture with meaning, at least to an extent.  

But just like scientists rue the Pivot Penalty (the idea that shifting one’s research focus from their known specialty can negatively impact their career) as a hindrance against scientific progress, I wonder if the rigorous formalism of the consistent photographic vision does the same thing in our field.

That seems to be the case with the work that I often see. I see successful artists who have been working for ten or twenty years reduced to 20, 40, 60 or even 100 photographs in a book or two and it can leave one with the impression that this is really all that they do, which tends not to be the case. Take, for example, Robert Adam’s book Summer Nights, which was re-released years later with more photographs from the original project included under the title Summer Nights, Walking and leaves the viewer with a different sensibility about the work - a more complicated one, perhaps - because the original formal restraints seem a bit loosened. The variety in the pictures has grown. The photographer didn’t change, the pictures he made didn’t change, only what I saw at his discretion did. 

In a more contemporary example, the Instagram grid - at least when I still used the service - seemed to only reinforce this sort of idea more deeply for some artists. On many widely followed profiles, pictures all in the same color palette and of similar compositions rained down from the top creating a soothing and coherent presentation that went nowhere beyond any single picture. And this was often, I got the impression, looked at as a sign of artistic maturity, a sign of finding a voice, a sign of wrangling the medium to serve one's purpose successfully. In some cases I am sure that it was true, but in most cases I think it was a dead end. The artists looked to repeating themselves ad nauseam. And of course none did it as well as Fukase did in Ravens. 

Over time I’ve learned that this sort of singular visual language is antithetical to how I make pictures. Thinking about it, especially during the process of photographing, isn’t conducive to good work or even really fun. I’ve endeavored to do this from time to time because I see an artist who has done this and almost get a sense of total understanding that much more quickly, but I don't think it's helped my art. The articulation of such a thing comes mostly later, in the sorting and presenting of chosen images.

The whole point of this note that I am writing though, is that I learned when I found this cheap retrospective of Fukase is that this monomaniacally restrained photographer isn't, and never was, Fukase either. The man who had produced the most striking example of a singular photographic voice that carries through a multitude of pictures - one so strong that I found it easy to imagine that every image he ever made as a mature artist was in the vein of this book - was not consistent or restrained in this way. The book he made was. He could be at times, clearly. But that was just one facet of his work and while he made more pictures that were consistent with the book he made many others that were far away from what the book is. 

When I think of Fukase now I think of an inveterate experimentalist, a man who tried and failed repeatedly, who would not have conformed to the preferences of the world or the algorithm to be visually consistent, and one who probably would not have troubled himself with such ideas much at all. This doesn’t mean his work lacked a through line - it just means that it is not found on a purely formal analysis, though I think that exists too (it’s just a little different than what Ravens might suggest. Understanding this and keeping it top of mind helps me to accept the restlessness that I think is evident in my own archive; that experimentalism itself is part of the through line. 

It helps to put language to the way that I've approached working with a camera over twenty years: to make sense of the reason why pictures can look so wildly different, why there are so many failures, and why that is not necessarily a sign of a flawed project in total. There is always more that you don't see, but when you are lucky enough to get the expanded view, it will probably be closer to the truth. Messier, but liberating. After getting a deeper understanding of the formalism of Fukase’s work I’ve slowly loosened the restraints on my way of seeing again. I don’t regret the work of recent years. As I mentioned above, I feel like I learned a new dialect, one which I know is useful and effective. But I am happy to understand that there is still a place for a color picture.