Opening: 7.03 – 18:30
Curators: Jérôme Sother, François Cheval and Yasmine Chemali

The street scenes of Fushikaden, the most iconic work of the Japanese photographer Issei Suda, are steeped in the harsh, inimical light of summer. The photographs were taken in Tokyo, where he lives, and also, or especially, in the farther regions of Tōhoku, Hokuriku, and Kantō, where throughout the 1970s he frequented the matsuri, traditional local festivals, half-religious and half-profane. Japan was nursing its wounds from World War II and the American occupation, and the country was experiencing
staggering growth on its way to becoming the world’s second leading economic power within a few years. Change was on the march, and time was short to capture the daily life of a country grappling with a major identity crisis, caught between anchored tradition and the hysteria of modernity.

Issei Suda began his career as a photographer for Shūji Terayama’s experimental theater troupe Tenjō Sajiki in 1967, before starting to work as an independent photographer in 1971.
While he borrowed the title Fushikaden from a treatise on traditional Noh theater, Suda was born in 1940 and raised on Hollywood screenwriting and the films of Orson Welles.
During the 1970s, nationally distributed photography magazines expanded their readership, whetted the appetite for novelty, and surged into the frenzy of images. Amateurs and professionals vied with each other for contest prizes and awards. Far more than in institutions – museum and galleries were nonexistent or hardly established – it was here in the magazines that the history of Japanese photography was written and theorized in real time. Before becoming a book, Fushikaden was published as a rensai, a series of eight portfolios in issues of Camera Mainichi spanning from December 1975 to December 1977. Suda’s success was immediate, and the publisher Asahi Sonorama brought out the book Fushikaden in 1978, with a selection of 100 photographs in place of the 138 originally chosen by Suda. It was only in 2012 that Akio Nagasawa published the entire series, offering an uncut Fushikaden thirty-four years after it was initially published.

‘Issei Suda: Fushikaden’ represents the third chapter of a Japanese trilogy initiated at the Mougins Center of Photography with the inaugural exhibition ‘Isabel Muñoz: 1001’ (2021), followed by ‘Yuki Onodera: Darkside of the Moon’ (2022).

The exhibition is organized in partnership with the Centre d’art GwinZegal, Guingamp and Akio Nagasawa Gallery, Tokyo.

gwinzegal.com
akionagasawa.com

Biography

Born in 1940 in Tokyo, Issei Suda graduated from the Tokyo College of Photography in 1962. In 1967, he became the official photographer for Shuji Terayama’s experimental theater troupe, Tenjo Sajiki, before embarking on a freelance photography career in 1971. In 1976, Suda rose to prominence after receiving the Newcomer’s Award from the Photographic Society of Japan for Fushikaden. He went on to win the society’s Annual Award in 1982 for his exhibition of the Monogusa Shui series, followed in 1985 by the First Prize at the Higashikawa National Photography Awards for Nichijo no danpen – Fragment of Everyday Life. In 1997, his book Human Memory garnered several accolades, including the Domon Ken Award. In 2013, his retrospective exhibition Nagi no hira – Fragments of Calm was held at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. Issei Suda passed away on March 7, 2019, in Chiba.

© SUDA ISSEI Works
Ueno Tokyo, 1975, Gelatin-silver print on baryta paper