About 45 years ago Masahisa Fukase made a book of pictures called Ravens as a way to, in part, process his divorce with his wife. The book is cacophonic as it primarily images ravens - singular and in groups, in stasis, in frenzied flight. The pictures are all monochrome, all 35mm, all of a sort of grainy vision reflective of the Provoke group of Post War Japanese photographers. When a picture arises in Ravens that is not, in fact, 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, in essence a very small world, 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 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, suffered a traumatic brain injury. He necessarily ceased making work before ceasing to live, although 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 have 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. I write here of the impressions it left on me. 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. No, they are about a sort of disciplined photographic formalism (a cousin to slippery terms like style or vision as photographers like to discuss). The idea is embodied by Ravens more successfully than just about anything else.

Some things slip through the cracks in my self-directed, continuing photographic education and it wasn't until I belatedly (and rather cheaply, I suppose) settled on the idea that something is better than nothing - I found a used version of Fukase's retrospective work for a much more affordable price, and it would of course include excerpts from this project, as well as much more.

The timing of the receipt of Fukase’s retrospective - last fall - was quite perfect because it gave me a little bit of freedom that I’d deprived myself of.

See, 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, especially because for me, photography was always a color medium. The moment of falling in love with the darkroom process that is so common amongst photographers was never part of my story. This whole notion while in some way inextricable from them, was considered a priori to questions of content or concepts - and those things are usually more substantial, I get it.

Part of the reason for the abandonment of color was that I was feeling stuck and I've always found that limitations have the potential to give rise to progress, but it was also that I was starting to lose trust in color photography as a medium - this before even generative AI began widely circulating and eroding it further. 

I recall that I reasoned, however faultily, that black and white photography was a more commonly 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 that the pictures I made would be seen in a certain way without need for explanation. 

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. The hyperreality of it, the ease with which a perfectly beautiful rendition of something could be captured began to feel almost grotesque. Of course there are not clean lines to draw here, but it's the world I saw coming. (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.)

But 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, 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 a sort of a formal experimentalist, but I deeply value seeing a sort of a rigorous through line in an artist’s work. Still, thinking of this too narrowly can be a trap. There are different ways that this through line can manifest and I must admit, I’ve tried to stay attuned to this with my own work that goes beyond what I think of the more traditional frameworks. 

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 above perception. To say nothing beyond the formal content of a picture, the world of photography seems to reward a kind of aesthetic consistency - many successful artists have readily identifiable visual signatures - stylistic formulas that are as much a reflection of technology as they are the artist. 

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 and even aperture setting, imaging pipeline even - 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, paying $50 for the processing of a single picture, as opposed to holding their small camera up to their eye and clicking. And to be clear, the process does imbue a picture with meaning. At least to me it does.  

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. 

At least, I think, that tends to be the case with the work that I often see. We 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 often is far from the case. The Instagram grid - at least when I still used the service - seemed to only reinforce this sort of idea more deeply. Pictures all in the same color palette and of similar compositions rained down from the top creating a soothing and coherent presentation. And this was almost always looked at as a sign of artistic maturity, a sign of finding a voice, a sign of wrangling in the medium to serve one's purpose successfully. And in many cases I am sure that it is true. But of course none do it as well as Fukase does with Ravens. 

But over time I’ve learned that this sort of this sort of singular visual language is antithetical to how I make pictures. Or at least that thinking about it, especially during the process of photographing, isn’t conducive to good work, or even 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. 

Here’s the thing though - what I learned when I found this cheap retrospective of Fukase is that it 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 indeed not consistent or restrained in this way. The book he made was. But of course, as it always is, that was just one chapter of his work, a sliver of time that he worked in, 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, one who probably would not have troubled himself with such surface ideas much at all. This doesn’t mean his work lacks a through line - it just means that it is not found on a purely formal analysis. Why am I even meditating on all of this? It helps me to accept the restlessness that I think is evident in my own archive, that experimentalism 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 seeing that work I’ve slowly loosened the restraints on my way of seeing again. I don’t regret the work of recent years, in ways it felt like I’ve gone through training to speak an additional language, one which I know is useful and effective. But I am happy to understand that there is still a place for a color picture.