Masahisa Fukase, Yoko, 2025

This highly anticipated new edition reissues Masahisa Fukase’s 1978 photobook Yoko, a timeless masterpiece in its own right and a seminal series in the Japanese photographer’s oeuvre. Shot between 1964 and 1976, Fukase chronicles his relationship with his wife Yoko from the time of their marriage until their divorce. Masahisa’s playful and imaginative photographs straddle the fine line between work of art and private snapshot. Originally published in 1978, after the divorce, “Yoko” also tells a story of love, adoration and loss, with photographs of Yoko occasionally interspersed with images of crows, which would later become the distinctive motif of another of Fukase’s masterpieces.

This new edition of Yoko includes all the photographs from the original book, with a new format to better emphasise the presence of the photographs. In addition to the original texts by Shoji Yamagishi, Harumi Setouchi, Masahisa Fukase and Yoko Miyoshi (under her former name, Fukase), this edition features a contemporary essay by photography historian Masako Toda and a new afterword by Fukase’s muse and ex-wife, Yoko Miyoshi, who fully supported the project.

At the time, leafing through the pages of Yoko, even though I knew it overflowed with the quintessence of Fukase, obsessed with photographing people, it was just a personal collection of photographs from our twelve years of marriage, an affirmation of the fact that “Fukase and I were here”, so I thought it would never become public knowledge.
Initially, there were some photographs that I would have preferred not to include in this reprint – which ones, I will leave to your imagination. But let me say that, out of respect for Fukase’s intentions and in the hope that this book will once again become known to the world, it was decided that the reprint would retain the composition of the original edition.
If Fukase were still alive and I could say one thing to him now, it would be, “Well, it is what it is, right!!!!!”
― from the afterword by Yoko Miyoshi