Yoko - Masahisa Fukase

Nearly fifty years after its original publication, Masahisa Fukase's masterpiece "Yoko" is finally available again.

This long-awaited new edition brings back Masahisa Fukase's 1978 photobook "Yoko," a timeless masterpiece in its own right and a defining series in the Japanese photographer's oeuvre. Shot between 1964 and 1976, Fukase traces his relationship with his wife Yoko from the moment of their marriage to their eventual divorce. Masahisa's playful, imaginative photographs tread the fine line between artwork and private snapshot. Originally published in 1978, after their divorce, Yoko also tells a story of love, adoration, and loss, with photographs of Yoko occasionally interspersed with images of ravens, which would later become the defining motif of another of Fukase's masterpieces.
This new edition of "Yoko" includes all of the photographs from the original book, with a new format to better emphasize the presence of the photographs. In addition to original texts by Shoji Yamagishi, Harumi Setouchi, Masahisa Fukase, and Yoko Miyoshi (under her former name, Fukase), this edition features a contemporary essay by photography historian Masako Toda and a new afterword by Fukase's muse and ex-wife, Yoko Miyoshi, who fully supported the project.

“At the time, looking through the pages of ‘Yoko,’ although I knew it was overflowing with the quintessential Fukase obsessed with photographing people, it was only a personal collection of photographs of our twelve years of married life, a statement that ‘Fukase and I were here,’ so I thought it would never become widely known.
At first, there were a few photographs I wished not to be included in this reprint—as for which ones, I’ll leave that to the imagination. But let me say that out of respect for Fukase’s intentions and in the hope that this book will once again become known in the world, it was decided that the reprint would retain the composition of the original edition.
If Fukase were still alive and I could say one thing to him now it would be, ‘Well, it is what it is, right!!!!!’”
― from Yoko Miyoshi’s afterword

first edition

stock number: NB771