Seiichi furuya biography template
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Mourning Through the Camera: Seiichi Furuya’s Elegy to His Late Wife
In a rare interview, the Japanese photographer speaks about revisiting memories of his late wife Christine Gössler through photography, who died by suicide in 1985
TextAlessandro Merola
Lead ImageSeiichi Furuya, Bologna, 1978 Courtesy of Chose Commune © Seiichi Furuya
Seiichi Furuyamet Christine Gössler, an aspiring actress and Austrian student of art history, in 1978. They married a few months later, and in 1981, had a son. From the beginning, Furuya felt compelled to photograph her. “I have seen in her a woman who passes me by, sometimes a model, sometimes the woman I love, sometimes the woman who belongs to me”, he wrote in Camera Austria in 1980. Together, they built an archive of thousands of images; an archive which Furuya has revisited, time and time again, since Christine jumped out of a ninth-floor window in East Berlin in 1985. These excavations have materialised in a series of photo books collectively entitled Mémoires (1989, 1995, 1997, 2006, 2010, 2020). It’s Furuya’s monument to his great love; his testament to the ties that bind and abide.
The latest addition to the series, First Trip to Bologna 1978 / Last Trip to Venice 1985, comes via Furuya’s second collab
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What Remains of Our Love
Graz, 1978. Seiichi Furuya met Christine Gössler, and the young couple decided to go to Bologna for their first trip. Forty years later, Seiichi Furuya found Super 8 film reels from this trip in his attic and decided to watch them just as Covid began to ravage Europe. They said the elderly were the most likely to die from the virus. Born in 1950, Seiichi Furuya felt he belonged to that generation and shut himself away in his home. “When I thought about how this ‘old man’ would take care of himself at home, I immediately thought of doing a photo book.”
The story of Christine Gössler and Seiichi Furuya began with Seiichi leaving Japan in 1973 for Europe on the Trans-Siberian Railway. After arriving in Austria, he first settled in Vienna before moving to Graz where he met Christine in 1978 and had a child with her in 1981. In 1982, Christine Gössler began to show signs of schizophrenia. Seiichi Furuya took many photographs of her. On October 7, 1985, she committed suicide by jumping out of a window in East Berlin. Seiichi has never stopped revisiting his archives and his history with Christine. This has taken the form of a series of five books entitled Memoirs, published between 1989 and 2010, and culminating with Face to Face, published by Chose