The photograph on page 80 is dated 1986, taken in East Berlin. On the old building apparently dead vines grasp the front wall, and a sign to the left of the front door reads “NERVENKLINIK.” Presumably this was the last hospital that Christine Grössler stayed at before she killed herself by jumping to her death. The picture was taken by her husband Seiichi Furuya, in the year after his wife’s suicide. I can hardly imagine the emotions Furuya had when he took this photograph.

Christine and Seiichi married in 1978, and their son Komyo Klaus was born in 1980. She was hospitalized many times for her depression. Furuya took many photographs of his wife and child. His pictures of his wife are inevitably haunting; most are in black and white, with Christine looking warily into the camera. Two of the most powerful are in color though: one, on page 11, is from 1978, the year they met, and was taken in Izu, Japan, the town of his birth. Christine must have been visiting Japan with him; she stands in front of a calm body of water, probably a lake. The sky is bright but full of clouds, but it must have been warm because she is only wearing a small black top. She also wears a gray skirt, blowing in the wind, and black waterproof boots. In her right hand she holds a bamboo stick, and around her neck she carries a camera. She smiles at her lover, a little self-conscious, but she looks happy. On the next page is a photo of Christine and Komyo taken in East Berlin in 1985, the year of her death. They are lit by evening sun, and Christine looks tired but serene; maybe there’s a look of love in her eyes as she faces directly into the camera lens.

But on page 93, in Venice also in 1985, Christine looks ill; extremely thin, and her head shaved, her eyes every tired, she sits on the floor against a wall, again lit by the sun. She is looking out of the window, not at her husband, as if she no longer ready to deal with earthly problems. Of course, it’s all too easy for us to read emotions into photographs when we know a few details of people’s lives, and a suicide just makes us speculate all the more what she might have been thinking.

There are other subjects apart from Furuya’s family. The photographs have been selected from the following groups or series:

• State Border, 1983
• As Far as the Eye Can See (Vienna 1983/84) 1989
• Limes: Images of the Wall Seen from East Berlin (1986-88), 1989
• Gravitation, 1990
• At Home in East Berlin (1985-87), 1993
• Displaced Persons-Refugees, 1993

The most powerful images are of the refugees from the Bosnian war, very simply photographed headshots in front of bright yellow backgrounds. Their faces are full of emotion — hope, grief, and warmth. Other pictures feature sky, trees, flowers, cats, mushrooms, fish, cows, landscapes, snakes, and a graveyard. There’s intrinsic power to them, but the fact of Christine’s suicide transforms them all. Of course, the tragedy of the war in Bosnia is an order of magnitude greater than one person’s suicide, but it is through Furuya’s lens that we see these different images, and this fact inevitably molds our understanding of and reaction to these images.

Of course the mere fact that a photographer has experienced tragedy does not make his or her work great art, nor does it mean that it will convey powerful emotions. Furuya’s approach is mostly straightforward, relying on its content for its power, rather using a particular style. The power of his work comes through going through the pages one by one and getting a sense of the context of the images. Furuya is an interesting and provocative photographer, and his work is worth looking at.

Link: Seiichi Furuya Photography Exhibition: Christine Furuya-Gössler, Mémoires 1978-1985

Categories: General, artandphotography