Seiichi Furuya – Mémoires 1995

Every photograph is a memento, becoming history directly its being taken, becoming a witness of time just passed. Seiichi Furuya developed from this his method and a multi-layered work. The Japanese photographer, who left his country at the beginning of the 70’s and has spent the last 20 years in Europe – mostly in Austria – produces works of memory using photography. He creates photographic memories of his own private and of the public past. Portraits of his beloved wife, who later died so tragically, are entangled with pictures of Amsterdam, Vienna, Graz, Dachau, Sachsenhausen, Japan, East Berlin together with portraits of Bosnian refugees to form a penetrating and contradictory imagery, raising questions about our own current existence.

The choice of photographs is always made with hindsight, sometimes years later, when the events have settled, when the banal and significant have separated. This form of temporal distancing also explains Furuya’s alienation in Christian Europe and leads to a purified and charged view of life, seen from the position of distanced familiarity. Under the title Mémoires 1995, the exhibition at Fotomuseum Winterthur shows a large and representative selection of Furuya’s body of work to date.

The exhibition was curated by Urs Stahel.