Brilliant sequencing

There’s no doubt that Masahisa Fukase’s book Ravens (aka Solitude of Ravens, aka Karasu) is one of the greatest photobooks of all time. It was voted the most influencial photobook of the last 25 years in a poll conducted by the British Journal of Photography.

It’s also my personal favorite. I return to it again and again for its images, its sequencing, its thinking, its meaning.

But there’s one sequence of images in particular that represents one of the greatest associative leaps in photography. Abstracting these five photographs from the whole doesn’t do the passage justice, but at least doing so points to this moment of photographic inspiration which, for me, is a touchstone for photographic sequencing, and which hopefully every photographer gets to see in book form at some time.

Fukase, prior to this passage, has shown a significant number of images of ravens, close-up and at a distance, in all sorts of contexts. Then, along comes this disruption:

The knowledge that Fukase started Ravens at the point of deep depression over the failure of his marriage is valuable here. The book is a  symphony of visual and intellectual movement—this is just one of its greatest turns.

Tomorrow is the second anniversary of Fukase’s death, after having lain in a coma since 1992, the year he fell down a flight of stairs.

(via douglaslowell)