Seiichi Furuya - Christine Furuya-Gössler, Mémoires 1978 - 1985

Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida is a canonical text in photography theory, where he developed his ideas about the twinned forces of presence and absence that run through every photograph; the simultaneous flattening and heightening of content; and the odd details that insist themselves for some spectators while they recede for others. This is what he defined as the punctum, “that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me),” the unexplainable detail that consumes one’s attention more than another.

While it might be argued that any photographer’s career is an exercise in such themes, the work of Seiichi Furuya (b. 1950, Izu, Japan) is immanently defined by Barthes’s concept of the punctum. The photographer’s career has been almost entirely preoccupied with one subject, his late wife Christine Furuya-Gössler. Her suicide in 1985 drove the new widower to examine the archive of daily portraits he took of her over their nearly nine-year marriage, eventually resulting in the Memoires series. Each book often repeats images from another, in myriad candid, banal, and momentous situations, repositioning each moment in hopes of seeing her anew, as if the spectator studies her as much as the photographer’s efforts to locate the punctum in each photograph, or to surface new ones.

The longest volume in the series, Christine Furuya-Gössler Mémoires, 1978–1985, is assembled from a collection of four lever arch files, arranged chronologically. Each photograph was annotated on the rear with a short note about the event. These annotations are sometimes curt, noting the location only, and other times more detailed, but still hesitant. The images depict Furuya-Gössler lying on her side next to their infant son, Komyo; another, she poses under a tree. Another, an intimate image of her face emerging from a bath.

“Never once did Christine ask me to take her photograph. I would suddenly get the urge to point my camera,” Furuya explained in an interview with i-D. This might suggest that perhaps Furuya’s erotic and emotional attention was motivated by possession and objectification, that the precipitating moments were suffused with the desire to contain and preserve. Alongside these revelations is the basic need to understand. Elsewhere, Furuya has described the continuous engagement with his photographs of his wife as a kind of publicized mourning and reckoning. “It was impossible, at least for me in the immediate aftermath of her death, to look back on my actions. Whether we were happy or miserable, time flew by,” he explained to AnOther Magazine. Even rearranging the same photograph in a different sequence, between other photographs in or out of time with their original moments, makes his past actions sensible and tangible, especially the “many wrong decisions and actions [he] made during the seven years and eight months” of his marriage to Furuya-Gössler. This patient repetition enables him to see in each image a new punctum, another secret insisting from the invisible background of images pored over and over, that in turn returns him to the totality of the complexities of his life with and love for her. Such a driven, committed repetition elevates it to a sincere, recuperative meditation about the moments of a life both captured and lost in a photograph.