Kyoto ③ Spring

特集・京都③ 春

by
深瀬昌久╱Masahisa Fukase

1974 was a hinge-year for Japanese photography—and for Masahisa Fukase. Mainstream magazines like Asahi Camera became the public arena where avant-garde language met mass readership, placing gear ads and reader pages alongside the sharpest work of the day. In that very year Fukase appeared in Asahi Camera’s feature “Kyoto ③ Spring,” while developing his intimate Yohko/From the Window series in Camera Mainichi. The private theatre of the couple began to leak into the city—Kyoto’s rituals, pavements and rivers becoming mirrors for the self.

Simultaneously, Fukase’s photographs entered MoMA’s landmark New Japanese Photography (1974), and he co-founded the WORKSHOP Photo School with Tomatsu, Moriyama, Araki, Hosoe and Yokosuka—an independent platform whose journal and classes shaped the next generation. Read this Kyoto feature as a crossroads of three histories: a personal narrative stretching from Album/Family toward Ravens; a magazine culture mediating Provoke-era aesthetics for a broad audience; and a city negotiating tradition and modernization in the mid-70s.