Seiichi furuya biography

Seiichi Furuya in Izu, Shizuoka is a Japanese photographer.
Seiichi FURUYA was born in Izu, Japan, in 1950.
His biography and his work are inseparable.

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INQUIRIES

For the past 40 years Seiichi Furuya has taken pictures of the world around him. Though primarily known for those he took of his wife, Christine, he has also shot photographs of political demonstrations, children, refugees, and a multitude of banal scenes that one would have been exposed to living mostly in East Berlin and Graz, Austria, since the 1970’s. From these photos, Furuya has made groupings to be presented in exhibitions and books that reflect how he has felt about given periods from the distance of when the selections were made. These acts of organization can be seen as a way of carving the totality of his images into a form. The other two artists’ works shown here also engage the notion of selection, albeit producing very different results. Yuji Agematsu, in his culling of detritus off the streets of New York from the infinite possibilities presented there for him, and Jean-Luc Moulène through the removal of material to create the contours of his objects. Though distinct in their use of tools and mediums, each artist displays his selected formulations

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Seiichi Furuya

Japanese photographer

Seiichi Furuya (古屋誠一, Furuya Seiichi, born 1950) in Izu, Shizuoka is a Japanesephotographer.^[1]

Photography career

As a student Furuya studied architecture and then spent two years at Tokyo College of Photography.

In 1973 he left his studies and his native Japan and traveled, ending up, according to Arthur Ollman in his book, The Model Wife, "a man in exile. He wears alienation like an obligation."

In Austria where he lived since 1982 he met and married Christine Gössler. From 1984 to 1987 he lived in East Berlin and worked as translator.

Christine was to become the primary subject of his photography until her suicide in 1985. His last pictures of her are of her shoes, neatly placed by the window she had just jumped out of, and her body, shot from the same window, on the ground, nine stories below.^[2] Today, Furuya lives in Graz.

External links

References

^(in Japanese) Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, editor. 328 Outstanding Japanese Photographers (『日本写真家事典』, N
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Seiichi Furuya
Seiichi Furuya (Izu,Giappone,1950). He met Christine Gössler in February 1978 in Graz. The couple married in June of the same year in Furuya’s hometown in Japan.
Their son, Komyo-Klaus, was born in 1981. In 1982, they moved to Vienna so that Christine could study drama. In 1984, Seiichi took a job as an interpreter and the family moved to Dresden, East Germany and then in 1985, to East Berlin. Christine, who had been suffering from mental instability for several years, took her own life on October 7.
Since 1975, FURUYA has had numerous exhibitions. He has also published a series of books on Christine, starting with Mémoires 1978-1988, followed by his seventh book Face to Face in 2020. The new book First Trip to Bologna 1978 /Last Trip to Venice 1985 (Chose Commune) will be released in March this year.
He was one of the founders of the photography magazine Camera Austria and has also curated exhibitions introducing Japanese photographers to Europe, such as Daido Moriyama, (1980), Shomei Tomatsu: Japan 1952-1981 (1984) and Nobuyoshi Araki: Akt-Tokyo 1971-19