Seiichi Furuya and his Desire To Present Christine to the World

 

 
Seiichi Furuya met Christine Gössler, an aspiring actress and Austrian student of art history, in 1978. They married a few months later, and in 1981, had a son. From the beginning, Furuya felt compelled to photograph her. “I have seen in her a woman who passes me by, sometimes a model, sometimes the woman I love, sometimes the woman who belongs to me”, he wrote in Camera Austria in 1980. Together, they built an archive of thousands of images; an archive which Furuya has revisited, time and time again, since Christine jumped out of a ninth-floor window in East Berlin in 1985. These excavations have materialised in a series of photo books collectively entitled Mémoires (1989, 1995, 1997, 2006, 2010, 2020). It’s Furuya’s monument to his great love; his testament to the ties that bind and abide.
 
The latest addition to the series, First Trip to Bologna 1978 / Last Trip to Venice 1985, comes via Furuya’s second collaboration with Chose Commune, and hits almost every emotional note. In many ways, it reads as a travelogue, divided into two trips that bookend his relationship with Christine. The first, a newly composed series titled First Trip to Bologna 1978, is comprised of stills from Super 8 film recorded one month after they met; the second is a re-edited version of Last Trip to Venice 1985, first self-published by Furuya in 2002. Much happened in between – and afterwards, too. But while this book – and indeed the photographer’s work at large – is invariably hinged to nostalgia, Furuya’s revisions transcend time and place, for he probes how photography can not only grieve a past life, but reimagine a new one.
 
Here, Furuya discusses his new book, the impetus behind Mémoires and what it means to mourn through photography.
 
Alex Merola: How did you meet Christine Gössler?
 
Seiichi Furuya: On 17 February 1978, Christine and I met at the opening of Gwenn Thomas’ exhibition Color Photographs at the Forum Stadtpark in Graz, Austria. She showed up with a woman I already knew, and she introduced me to Christine. After the ceremony, the attendees must have had a chat at a pub somewhere in the city, and she must have been there and I must have got her phone number. I don’t remember exactly what happened next. I must have had too much wine.
 
Ten days later, I found the courage to call Christine and invite her on a date. Our relationship became inseparable from the day we saw the ‘jidaigeki’ film Harakiri (1962). It must have been a few years after her death when I discovered these scribbled words in my diary: ‘I invited her to a movie, but I’m a little late. Christine looks a little angry. The scars on her neck and wrists are bothering.’ Now that I think back, I realise that our relationship began and ended with suicide.
 
Christine visited my apartment the following day, and it was here that I took the first picture of her. From that day on, we met almost every day, and, although my diary states that we travelled to Bologna from 18–25 March, strangely enough, I still can’t recall anything about our trip. I took my Leica and my Super 8 camera which I shot films with. The fact that Christine’s colleague gave us a lift to Bologna was only revealed when I watched the digitised films which I discovered in my attic in 2018. However, instead of bringing back memories of the trip, I couldn’t recall anything for over a week. This didn’t change even after looking at the many photographs and videos I took during our stay.
 
According to Christine’s diary, I made up my mind to marry her while we were in Bologna. One week after returning, we went back to Japan and took part in a Shinto-style wedding ceremony at my home in Izu. With that, our relationship quickly moved to the next level. Thinking back, it may have been the happiest time for us, although she seemed a bit caught off guard by the sudden change in her environment. Within three and a half months, we were married.

AM: Do you have any memory of shooting the films?
 
SF: Very little, however, a detailed list I produced after digitising all the films showed that from the time I met Christine until the end of my trip to Bologna, I filmed three films totaling just over 20 minutes. Yet I have no memory of the two of us watching them together. In those days, it took a lot of time and effort to prepare a projector and screen to view Super 8 film. I was never a video fan, and I think I was so busy with my daily life that I rarely watched or edited the films I made.
 
AM: What was your process for selecting the stills from the footage?
 
SF: I watched the three films several times in a row. As I followed the dark, grainy images, I almost felt as if I was watching scenes from a famous movie. One after the other, scenes that seemed to have never existed in my memory – and, therefore, could not have been lost from my memory – appeared before my eyes. At the same time, I felt as if I were right in this moment. Especially when I came across the scene in which Christine, wearing a blue sweater, smiles at me through the mesh of her cocktail hat which she found at the flea market. A nostalgic feeling came over me as I remembered why I fell in love with her. And then, I couldn’t hide my surprise that I was in love with her again, as she acted so vividly in the video. I have shown Christine’s photographs in many photo books and exhibitions, but, of course, they were all still images. When I saw her in motion, I felt a surge of emotion that I could not describe.
 
It was hard to believe that all this had really happened 44 years ago. But since I had no memories at all, I wondered whether I could, by extracting stills, frame by frame, devise a new memory in the form of a book. I printed contact sheets containing hundreds of frames, laid them out on the floor and waited for a new narrative to emerge. Thus began the editing of what I imagined to be a ‘monogatari’ travel story. For a moment, I had the illusion that our journey to Bologna would begin right now: the tale of a journey that has an air of scandal and mystery about it, the delicate scent of spring floating in the air.
 
AM: This liveliness seems to be aided by the cinematic sequencing you have deployed here.
 
SF: I believe the sequencing of the frames excels in depicting the subtle flow of time that is impossible to express when using individual still images. In other words, it gives life to dead images.

 
AM: And where the first section possesses an air of spring, the second section has a very different resonance. How did the trip to Venice in 1985 happen?
 
SF: Our family moved from Dresden in East Germany to Graz so that Christine, who had become ill, could seek treatment. She underwent her third hospitalisation and was discharged a week later. The next night, she suddenly said that she wanted to go away and be alone with me. We set off to Venice, and I recorded this four-day trip on two slide films, of which one was accidentally exposed twice. The photographs began with the days surrounding Christine’s hospitalisation and ended with a portrait of her looking back at me with a smile on the ferry. Having moved from Dresden to Berlin for a new job, I mistakenly loaded this already-exposed film back into the camera and shot the streets of East Berlin.
 
This was our final trip together. Even after Christine left the hospital, her health was not good. Four days after returning from Venice, she had to be hospitalised again. She moved back to live in East Berlin, and her mental state continued to be unstable. Then, on October 7, she took her own life.
 
AM: In 2002, you self-published Last Trip to Venice 1985. While it shares much of the content of this second section, the sequencing is new.
 
SF: Our Venice journey remains vividly in my memory, from the moment we left on the express train to the moment we got back home. I knew that this was a limitation, because it was, in many ways, impossible to edit it in such a way that it would feel like a free story. When I contacted Chose Commune about the possibility of publishing a book about Bologna, the editor, Cécile Poimboeuf-Koizumi, suggested that I should include the Venice trip too. I was surprised and delighted, and we agreed that she would edit the book independently.
 
AM: Christine’s smile – in Bologna, through the mesh of her cocktail hat, and in Venice, from the back of the ferry – reverberates across the book, across the distance of time. Yet much happened in between these two trips.
 
SF: The ‘blue smile’ of Christine in Bologna – which was probably trying to tell me what was in her heart – could return momentarily, even amidst the days when she was overwhelmed by her mental illness. I had documented those few moments in Venice, jumping seven years in time to encounter the same smile. Of course, it was only after I first saw the dummy of this book that I realised this smile’s ‘jumping’. I still remember thinking: ‘I’m glad we came to Venice,’ as I photographed the moment she smiled slightly at me with her shaved head while crossing the canal on the ferry. Photographing, itself, has always been an act of mourning these beautiful, painful and unrepeatable moments.
 
Coincidentally, the destinations of the two trips were cities in Italy. And in compiling our first and last journeys in one book, I had an epiphany … People have no choice but to carry their destiny, to fight against tragic evil to fulfil their lives. And we can’t avoid the fact that sometimes tragic evil wins the battle. I chose to present this sad fact in the form of a photo book. I thought, I can’t bury her regret. I can’t kill her twice.  

 
AM: Is this the impetus underpinning the Mémoires books? What Roland Barthes articulated as photography’s ability to mechanically reproduce – to infinity – what happened once?
 
SF: My first book in the Mémoires series was created as a requiem for Christine. It triggered a revelation … I had to unravel the circumstances that led to the unfortunate ending. The repeated publication of Mémoires was never planned. It was the new uncertainty presented by the book – which I thought would be my last – that compelled me to produce the next. As one thing was clarified, new questions arose. It was a repetitive process. Eventually, I came to the conclusion that I could not find the answer I should have been looking for. If photography had not existed, my life would have taken a completely different path. I would not have been troubled by the intricate yet real past that only comes back through photographs. The ability to forget is very important for human life. However, photographs resist this function. A photograph is a demon that transforms a past moment into the eternal present.
 
I think that making a photo book is like assembling chaotic and complex images towards one big theme in one’s head. As the work progresses, the outline of the theme becomes clearer and clearer. I think it might be similar to how a composer writes a symphony by combining individual notes. For me, a photo book is like a resume, a record of my life and the transformation of my mental states. I believe the power of photography as a medium lies in the fact that it may enable the expression of something that cannot be expressed in the realm of language. Life is to be lived full of this something. 
 
AM: Is this a belief that has intensified as you have grown older?
 
SF: Now that I am 72 years old, my creative activities are constantly guided by my remaining time. That is, I am always thinking about what I should do during the time I have left. The first thing on my to-do list is to use the photographs that Christine took during our seven years or so together. It is my attempt to capture her worldview as she would have seen and felt it. The first dummy book has just been completed. It is tentatively titled By Christine 1978–1985, and is about 650 pages long. These photo books are something that I keep making so that I will be able to give Christine a souvenir when I meet her again. They could also be said to be a report of how I lived my life after her death. I, too, will leave this world in the near future … I will literally take the final journey to reunite with her. When Christine was buried in 1985, my son Komyo laid a large portrait of her, an airplane that he had built himself and a bunch of wildflowers that we had picked together from our garden on her coffin. When the time comes, I will take all of my photo books.
 
First Trip to Bologna 1978 / Last Trip to Venice 1985 by Seiichi Furuya is published by Chose Commune.
 
 
Mourning Through the Camera: Seiichi Furuya’s Elegy to His Late Wife. By Alex Merola. Another Magazine, March 14, 2022.

First Trip to Bologna 1978 / Last Trip to Venice 1985 is the seventh book in a series of titles about Furuya’s wife. In it, he revisits the first and final holidays they spent together before her untimely death.
 
Between 1989 and 2010, Seiichi Furuya released a series of five books, titled Mémoires. They explored the relationship with his late wife, Christine Gössler, who tragically took her own life in 1985. Composed of portraits, the books chronicle the life they made together, focusing primarily on their day-to-day existence in Graz, Austria, where they met in 1978 and lived for six years.
 
Throughout the making of Mémoires, the Japanese photographer attempts to work through the emotional fallout of his wife’s premature death, hoping to gain not just a better understanding of their relationship, but also of Gössler’s own thoughts and feelings during what was an extremely intimate, yet at times strained relationship.
 

In 1983, Gössler was diagnosed with schizophrenia and, for the final two years of her life, was like “a shell with a closed lid”. Speaking last year in an interview with Aperture, Furuya said: “This lasted until her final day in Berlin in October 1985. It wasn’t until 2005 that I became fully aware that she was dealing with problems in her life alone.”
 
First Trip to Bologna 1978 / Last Trip to Venice 1985 is Furuya’s seventh book within this extensive body of work. It follows on from Face to Face (2020), which, for the first time since the photographer began working with his personal archive, includes photographs of him taken by her.
 
This release marked an important progression in the project, as Furuya showcased Gössler’s own participation in documenting their lives. “Finally, with Face to Face, Christine can be recognised as a creator herself,” he explains. “It’s another volume of Mémoires, with her being credited as the author of her own works.”
 
In First Trip to Bologna 1978 / Last Trip to Venice 1985, we witness yet another evolution in the project, this time in regards to the medium. All of the releases up until this point have consisted of still photographs. The latest book presents frames taken from videos shot on Super 8 film during the pair’s first and last trips abroad.
 
Furuya had almost entirely forgotten about the initial trip. “I found this film in the attic and was very surprised when I watched the digitised film on a screen,” he says. “No matter how many times I watched the video, I couldn’t recollect memories from the trip [to Bologna]. It got to the point where I doubted if I was even there with her.”

 
Acknowledging this gap in his memory, Furuya has focused on “creating a brand-new story” of the trip, reimagining this early experience in their relationship. These frames sit alongside images of the couple’s final holiday to Italy, shortly before Gössler’s death. Together, they continue Furuya’s three-decades long endeavour to give his wife “an eternal life”.
 
Seiichi Furuya looks back at the beginning and end of his relationship with his late wife.  By Daniel Milroy Maher.  British Journal of Photography, March, 2022. 

Seiichi Furuya, based in Graz, Austria, for almost fifty years, is an established member of the European photo community and cofounder of the esteemed journal Camera Austria International. But his departure from his native Japan to his adopted country of Austria is not widely known. At the end of September 1973, Furuya left from Yokohama on a Soviet cargo ship, arriving in Vienna in early October. Furuya had been a student of photography at Tokyo Polytechnic University during an increasingly turbulent time in postwar Japan. Between the university riots, the anti–Vietnam War movement, and the anti–Japan-US Security Treaty movement, Tokyo was like a battlefield. Furuya frequently participated in the demonstrations with his camera. But as the movement cooled off, realizing that there was no longer a place for him in Japan, he burned his negatives and left.
 
Furuya moved to Graz two years after his arrival in Vienna and soon connected with other photographers. He became a founding and active member of Fotogalerie im Forum Stadtpark, an artist cooperative organizing exhibitions and occasionally planning workshops with photographers, including Mary Ellen Mark and Ralph Gibson. In 1979, the group started the inaugural Symposion über Fotografie (Symposium on Photography), which occurred annually until 1997. The inaugural three-day symposium included participants such as Lee Friedlander, Robert Heinecken, Joseph Kosuth, and John Szarkowski. Furuya also served as liaison to many key Japanese photographers working at that time, including Shomei Tomatsu, Daido Moriyama, Masahisa Fukase, Miyako Ishiuchi, and Nobuyoshi Araki, helping many of them set up their first exhibitions in Europe. Around the same time as the launch of the symposium, Furuya collaborated with Manfred Willmann and Christine Frisinghelli to launch a new magazine, Camera Austria, the first issue of which was published in 1980.
 
Face to Face is the sixth volume of work Seiichi Furuya has published under a variation of the title Mémoires (1989, 1995, 1997, 2006, 2010). Unlike with the other five books, Furuya shares equal authorship in this edition: Christine Gössler’s gaze at Furuya, and his gaze at Gössler, intersect through photographs that each made of the other. While Furuya continues to work with the materials created during Gössler’s life—like an ongoing body of work that resulted from a trip they took to Bologna, among other images from their life together—he has stated that this is the last of the Mémoires variations. In these works, Furuya challenges us to think about what it means for an artist to go so deep into a single, emotionally charged body of work, made so long ago and revisited time and time again.

 
Yasufumi Nakamori: Face to Face [Chose Commune, 2020], published last year, is the first entry to the Mémoires series in ten years. Before diving into Face to Face, please tell us how you left Japan for Austria in the early 1970s and what you were doing before that in Japan.
 
Seiichi Furuya: At the end of September 1973, I left Japan from the Port of Yokohama on a Soviet cargo ship called Khabarousk and arrived in Austria’s capital Vienna in early October, along the way passing Nakhodka, Khabarovsk, and Moscow. Around 1970, I was a student photographer in Tokyo during what was known as a turbulent time in postwar Japan. Between university riots, the anti–Vietnam War movement, and the anti–Japan-US Security Treaty movement, Tokyo was like a battlefield. I was around twenty years old at the time. Although I didn’t belong to any particular group, I was one of those people who frequently participated in the demonstrations. For me, bringing my camera and taking photos did not preclude me from participating in the demonstrations. The highly charged atmosphere of the society gradually cooled off as the Japan-US Security Treaty was set up to renew automatically. When the turbulence ended, I started realizing that there was no longer a place for me in Japan, and that thought grew stronger over time. I had a friend who had left Japan earlier and was living in Vienna at the time. Eventually I left Japan under the pretext of visiting this friend. After spending two nights on the ship, we docked at Nakhodka. The moment I stepped onto the land, I thought to myself that I was probably never going to return to Japan. Right before leaving Japan, I burned all the photographic records of my bustling life in Tokyo.
 

 
Nakamori: Graz has been the base of your creative activities for forty-five years, during which you cofounded Camera Austria. When and for what reason did you move to Graz? Please talk about how you arrived at co-founding Camera Austria, especially your involvement with Symposion on Photography.
 
Furuya: After staying in Vienna for two years, I moved to Graz, which is the second largest city in Austria, and I have been here since. The biggest reason for the move was that I got a job at a camera store in Graz through an acquaintance whom I came to know through photography. While working at the store, I came to know others who shared interest in photography and eventually became a founding and active member of Fotogalerie im Forum Stadtpark, an artist-based voluntary organization. In the beginning, we organized about ten photo exhibitions a year and planned workshops of famous photographers from time to time. Some notable workshops that I attended include ones for Mary Ellen Mark and Ralph Gibson. Three years ago, I found in the attic some black-and-white Super 8 film, which had detailed footages of Mark’s workshop from 1979. In the fall of 1979, we started the inaugural Symposion über Fotografie [Symposion on Photography]. We invited a dozen or so guests from around the world who were active in photography and hosted a three-day symposium.
 
Americans including Lee Friedlander, Robert Heinecken, Joseph Kosuth, Allan Porter, and John Szarkowski also attended the symposium. As part of the brain behind the whole operation, Christine Frisinghelli was involved with the founding of both the organization as well as Camera Austria International. She was in charge of all the negotiations and translated the inadequate words of those of us who were self-claimed photographers into something beautiful. I remember it as if everything happened only a few days ago… driving to the airport to pick up Friedlander and Szarkowski, working on a draft version of what was going to be published about the symposium, Friedlander used a handmade lightbox which was stored in the darkroom up in the attic to copy slides he brought for the lecture. At the time, for Europeans and Japanese, the mecca of photography was America. Instead of us going over to America, we invited folks who were active on the frontline of photography in America to come over and it was a huge success. For the inaugural symposium, we also invited Shoji Yamagishi from Japan. Unfortunately, he passed away while still corresponding with me to finalize his lecture. Szarkowski paid tribute in front of his portrait at the symposium.
 
We hosted the Symposion on Photography every fall for seventeen years until 1997. In charge of Japanese affairs, I worked with Shomei Tomatsu, Daido Moriyama, Masahisa Fukase, Tsuneo Enari, Miyako Ishiuchi, and Nobuyoshi Araki, and probably helped many of them set up their first show or solo exhibition in Europe. While working on the symposium, we started planning for the publication of a photography magazine. Manfred Willmann of the organization and I worked on initial drafts of the new magazine while referencing the latest Japanese camera magazines that were getting delivered to my place every month. In 1980, the first issue of Camera Austria was published. At first, we thought about using our own photos and publishing the magazine under issue 0 as a pilot. Before we knew it, the magazine was published as the inaugural issue. I think it’s worth mentioning the origin of the name of the magazine: When contents of the first issue were mostly decided, we held a meeting in the basement of Forum Stadtpark to decide on its name. Six or seven members put forward their proposed names, but none of them got a decisive yes from the group. At the time, an acquaintance of mine who also left Japan, and was in the middle of his own wandering journey, shouted out the name “Camera Austria.” No one objected. I think that over the years Symposion on Photography has provided a platform to discuss and demonstrate the evolving definition and meaning of photographic expression through real-life examples. Meanwhile, Camera Austria continued to grow while keeping pace with changes that were happening at the symposium. 

 
 
Nakamori: Please tell us how you met Christine Gössler, your life partner and a coauthor of Face to Face, who tragically took her own life in 1985.
 
Furuya: In February 1978, at Forum Stadtpark, I met Christine for the first time at the opening of a solo exhibition by Gwenn Thomas called Color Photographs. Christine came with another woman who was a mutual acquaintance of both Manfred Willmann and mine. Ten days later, I mustered up the courage to call her and asked her to watch a movie together. We saw the Japanese movie Harakiri. From that day on, our lives became inseparable. Looking back, I realize that our relationship started with a movie about suicide, and ended with her own suicide. In mid-March of that year, we went to Bologna for a week. According to her notebook, I made up my mind to marry her while we were in Bologna. One week after returning from Bologna, I went back to Japan for the first time since 1973 and Christine came with me. During our two-month stay in Japan, we took part in a Shinto-style wedding ceremony at my home in Izu, and with that our relationship quickly moved on to the next level. Thinking back, it may have been the happiest time for us, although she seemed a bit caught off guard by the sudden change in environment. Shortly after returning from Japan, I quit my job at the camera store and started a new phase of life without a regular job. Christine was aiming to complete her thesis at university, but she eventually gave up and started working for the Austrian National Broadcasting Corporation.
 
There is an old passage that I wrote that describes, in simple terms, our encounter and how I felt about her. The passage was included alongside a portrait of Christine in the first issue of Camera Austria in 1980. It implied a deep connection between the human encounter and the characteristics and essence of photography as an expressive medium. So much so that it wouldn’t be strange to say that the passage could also have been written for Face to Face, published in 2020.
 
  “From the first day I began taking photographs of her regularly. I have seen in her a woman who passes me by, sometimes a model, sometimes the woman I love, sometimes the woman who belongs to me. I feel it is my duty to continue to photograph the woman who holds so many meanings for me.
 
   When I consider that taking photographs means fixing time and space, then this work—the documenting of the life of one human being—is exceptionally thrilling for me. In facing her, in photographing her, and looking at her in photographs, I also see and discover “myself.”
 

 
 
 
Nakamori: After Christine passed away, you edited and published several different editions of Mémoires featuring photographs from her life. I was wondering if all of that might have helped you get to know her better.
 
Furuya: In 1981, our son was born. Around the summer of 1982, the three of us left Graz and moved to Vienna. By that time, Christine had already started producing her own radio program at the Austrian National Broadcasting Station. One day, out of the blue, she said to me, “I want to be an actor. I want to be on the stage. It’s a dream I’ve had since I was a kid.” I was against it. After having lived together for four years by then, I honestly didn’t think she had what it takes to get through all the hardship that’s necessary in order to become an actor. I thought I knew her sensitive and compassionate personality. I thought I knew how, despite her modesty and tendency to not show her true feelings and thoughts, she was the type of person who would devote herself completely to something. However, as someone who didn’t have a job with steady pay and was at the mercy of Camera Austria, I strongly felt responsible for the impoverished life my family was going through, and thus I couldn’t convince her otherwise. When she started taking private lessons in order to matriculate at a theater college, Christine became like a shell with a closed lid and stopped talking to me about not just theater, but also things in her daily life. This lasted until her final day in Berlin in October 1985. It wasn’t until 2005 that I became fully aware that she was dealing with theater and other problems in her life alone.
 
Nakamori: Please tell us how Face to Face came about. You published five photobooks from 1989 to 2010 under the title Mémoires (all with Christine as subject). What’s the relationship between those five books and Face to Face?
 
Furuya: In the summer of 1987, I went back to Graz from East Berlin. It was when I started organizing her belongings that I discovered her notes. But I didn’t have the courage to read them right away. I was afraid that it was something that I either couldn’t bear to know or didn’t need to know. The notes were handwritten in German, so it wasn’t like I could easily read and understand them anyway. If they were written in Japanese, I’m sure things would have been different. It wasn’t until almost twenty years after her death, around Christmas 2005, that I finally decided to find out what the notes were about. I asked a girl who was a total stranger working part-time at the Graz Art Museum to reproduce a clean copy of the notes. I read and reread that clean copy carefully during a two-month stay in Paris. I hadn’t hid any secrets from Christine and always thought that I was living a straightforward life. However, Christine’s notes revealed that she’d become obsessed with theater and was increasingly struggling with her own limits while dealing with her mother and our child. I was shocked to read that at some point, she thought her theater instructor had become the only person who could forgive her, like a true mother. I didn’t know any of this, and it was as if I was reading about a different person. For me, the expressive power of her notes was beyond what photography could achieve. There were quite a few parts of her notes that even the female student who reproduced the clean copy couldn’t fully understand. In 2006, I published the fourth edition of Mémoires [titled Mémoires 1983] using portions of her notes along with photos.
 
After Christine killed herself in East Berlin in 1985, I worked there for two more years, finishing my job as an interpreter. In the summer of 1987, I returned to Graz to reunite with my son. On June 12, 1987, President Reagan delivered his “Tear Down This Wall” speech to Gorbachev on the west side of the Brandenburg Gate, which was also a symbol of the division between East and West Berlin. I listened to the speech along with many Stasi, National Secret Police of East Germany, on the east side of the gate. Of course, for someone who always carried a camera, I took photos of this historic occasion. Although at the time, no one, including probably President Reagan himself, foresaw that just two years later the Berlin Wall would come down along with the collapse of East Germany. In 2010, the fifth and final volume of Mémoires was published, which documented our lives moving from Dresden to East Berlin in 1984 and up until my return to Graz in 1987.
 
In 1989, my solo exhibition was held at the Neue Galerie Graz [the state museum of modern art in Graz]. The first edition of Mémoires was published at the same time. Meeting the museum director to discuss the name of the exhibition, I suggested a few names, such as Travelogue. But it took a while for us to agree. Eventually, the director said that what I was thinking about and trying to do would fit well with the French word mémoires. Thus, the name of the exhibition and my photobook was born. The exhibition was supposed to be important for both commemorating Christine and for sorting through my own feelings. It toured Vienna and Tokyo, and in the midst of changing venues, I felt that something new was stirring inside me. This feeling first came about when the 1995 edition of Mémoires was published, and lingered over the course of publishing the 1997 and 2006 editions, and even when I published what was meant to be the final iteration of Mémoires in 2010.
 
I publicly announced, at my solo exhibition at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography [formerly the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum] in 2010, that this would be the final publication in the Mémoires series. I felt that no matter how many times I tried with the publications of these photobooks, I didn’t really understand anything new. At the same time, I wanted to work on a book of my works that were not directly related to Christine. However, I had a stroke just before the exhibition in Tokyo, and it took me at least five years to recover. Since the announcement in 2010, I avoided works related to Christine and spent my days away from photography to focus on recovering my health.

 
Nakamori: What brought you back to photography and back to the world of Mémoires?
 
Furuya: Something came along out of the blue. At the end of 2017, the director of a photography museum in Japan reached out to me about doing a solo exhibition. While on the phone, I had this sudden feeling that I was being pulled back into the world of Mémoires. I was surprised, as I had been avoiding it until then, but the feelings just rushed in as if bursting through a dam. But this time, there was a definitive difference from the previous books, as I thought about presenting mainly works done by Christine herself for the exhibition. With only a few exceptions, the different editions of Mémoires had mainly presented photos that I took of Christine. Over the years, I was consumed with my own works, and I didn’t realize that Christine was a creator in her own right, with works expressing herself, until some thirty years after she passed away. To prepare for the exhibition, I started organizing her belongings, which had been stored in the attic for decades. I found her writings, Super 8 footage, cassette tapes, 110 film—things that I had forgotten about or saw for the first time. There was a reversal film of me standing behind a tripod with a 6 by 7 camera, which was taken on the coast of my hometown of West Izu in 1978. Christine must have taken that picture while I was taking a portrait of her standing on the edge of the cliff, with a Leica camera strapped around her neck, wearing tall, black rubber boots and carrying a bamboo stick. I was excited to have discovered this and found myself uttering the words “face to face.”
 
I arrived at Face to Face after going through five volumes of Mémoires. In a sense, my photos in each of those books are the starting point to make sense of the tragedy and mystery of the woman that is Christine. It was difficult for me to dismiss her death simply as a result of schizophrenia, which is a standard response given by society these days. Some friends tried to comfort me by using this standardized response. But after going through trial and error for over twenty years, the sad truth remains that I still don’t fully understand why it happened. Finally, with Face to Face, at least Christine can be recognized as a creator herself. It’s another volume of Mémoires, with her being credited as the author of her own works.

 
 
Nakamori: A key difference between Face to Face and your other works is the alternation between photos you took of Christine and photos that she took of you. Please tell us about the challenges of making and editing a photobook that focuses on the intersection of two creators.
 
Furuya: I was hoping to find more photos that Christine took. As if answering my prayer, I found 110 film negatives that I didn’t know existed, as well as color negatives from a 35 mm camera from when she started taking photos again in 1985. Eventually, it became clear that Christine was often taking pictures of me, and that we were taking pictures of each other at almost the same time. The act of taking photos and having our own photos taken continued, with varying frequency, until the day before she took her own life. On top of that, the hardest part was finding myself in my own photographs. I carefully checked the photos that I took from the time I first met her until I lost her, because sometimes she took photos of me with cameras that I was using. I made prints from selected films, arranged them in chronological order, and started to look at them carefully. The exhibition hall for Camera Austria was an ideal place for doing so. When viewed side by side, the prints were about twenty meters long. Just when the prints were completed such that they would fit nicely with the layout of the venue in Japan, we heard the news that the exhibition had been canceled. At the beginning of 2019, I immediately switched from planning an exhibition to planning a photobook, and carried on working. At that time, after having finished the selection of photos and arranging the material in chronological order, I selected the Marseille-based Chose Commune to be the publisher. I was told that Cécile Sayuri Poimboeuf-Koizumi was the editor in charge, and I entrusted the production of the book to her. If the editor wasn’t a woman, I’m not sure that I could have entrusted the whole process to someone else. Instead, I was completely hands-off.
 
I was shocked when I viewed the printed photobook for the first time in December 2020. After opening the cover and going through the pages, I almost felt that the two people in the book were talking to each other. It was like traveling back in time and space. I didn’t realize this when I was still preparing for an exhibition. I’m sure it has a lot to do with the binding of the photobook and the layout of each page. When the book is closed, the two people are still and facing each other, just like the title, face to face. But when you turn the pages, it’s as if a switch has been flipped, and the two people start to move and talk to each other. I reread the book and it felt the same every time. Maybe it’s something only I can experience, since I know the background of the photos. I also thought that might be what it means to have a book of moving pictures for adults. Some might simply think that what’s happening here is two people staring at each other and trying to read into the meaning of each other’s facial expressions, but one should be mindful that such reproduction of the act of staring is only made possible by the incredible invention of photography. Capturing a momentary image is one of the most salient characteristics of, and the original purpose of, photography. In that sense, what you see in terms of two people’s facial expressions satisfies that aspect of photography very well. But I can’t help but feel that those photos also express something beyond that. This is something that one becomes aware of only after a photo, which captures a past reality, is taken, and it’s something that is almost impossible to experience in real life. Even on the occasions when we take photos of each other, everything is a series of moments that keep changing. The moments when we stare at each other are so fleeting amid the passing flow of time that it is impossible to consciously read into and interact with each other mentally there and then. Photography is the only expressive medium through which we can relive and reconfirm a moment from the past. In that sense, I think Face to Face is a perfect embodiment of the magic of photography.
 

 
Nakamori: What does the act of taking photos mean to you? What does making and publishing photobooks mean to you?
 
Furuya: While thinking about how to respond to this question, I realized that I had never thought about the meaning of taking photos. I just always took photos before thinking about meaning or purpose. But for the last ten years, I haven’t taken many pictures. The reason is simple—things are less visible to me now, and my inner desire and need to take photos are not what they used to be. I think one of the reasons is that I have had almost no chance to expose myself to the vicissitudes of today’s world, and the lifestyle or habit of always carrying a camera with me wherever I go has largely gone away. For a while, I was taking pictures with a digital camera for blogging. Starting about a year ago, I’ve been taking photos of my grandkids and the change of seasons in my garden with my mobile phone. But at the end of the day, for me, a photo is a copy of reality printed on film that can be touched by hand. I have no interest in creating “artworks” using the medium of photography. For me, photography is the act of quickly capturing an image that approximates a premonition we feel when encountering moments of anxiety or interest in daily life. In my case, it can also be said that the act of taking photos, instead of, say, writing, is a way for me to record my impression and experience of encountering things that I can’t comprehend even through imagination, but is somehow connected to my existence. I’ve been called a “boundary” photographer by some. In fact, one of my works is called Boundary and I took photos of the Berlin Wall, but many portraits of Christine also portray the boundaries between people. It doesn’t matter if the quality of a photo is good or bad; it is no longer my concern in the moment it’s taken. Then, when it revives with the passage of time, it becomes the first time for me to face a photo that I once took.
 
I think that making a photobook is like assembling chaotic and complex images toward one big theme in your head. As the work progresses, the outline of the theme becomes clearer. I think it might be similar to how a composer writes a symphony by combining individual notes. For me, with the exception of my first photobook, AMS [Edition Camera Austria, 1981], I keep making photobooks so that I can bring them along with me when I eventually meet Christine again. Maybe they can also be called reports. There is another important reason why I keep making these photobooks—it is to tell our son and our grandchildren what kind of a person she was in ways that I could never do with words. The day after Face to Face arrived from Chose Commune, I brought it with me to the front door of my son’s house. There were strict rules in place related to the novel coronavirus. My son was fearful that I might contract the virus from my grandchildren, so we didn’t see each other. It seems that my son was more worried than I was about older folks getting infected. In Face to Face, my son showed up on many of the pages. Since this was his first time seeing these photos, I wasn’t sure how he would react. I was told that later that night, he read the photobook with his eldest daughter, who was six years old at the time. They seem to have enjoyed the book, and he was asked a lot of questions. My granddaughter was a little confused at first since her grandmother, Christine, looked youthful in those photos.
 
Now that I’m over seventy years old, I feel that I don’t need to hide anything anymore. There are a few reasons why I’ve published photobooks and portraits of Christine again and again over the years, but there’s one key reason that I’ve never publicly stated. That is, I want to help accomplish her childhood dream of standing on the stage—a dream that tormented her and may have forced her to kill herself. For example, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and MoMA in New York have collected several photos of her, and her portrait on the coast of Izu in 1978 was just exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Seeing her smile at me with that same bamboo stick, this time in New York, I couldn’t help but go up to the photo and talk to her. I never thought I could meet her again in such a place. I will continue to publish works of her and works by her, all of which always contain my unwavering desire to give my deceased wife an eternal life. 
 

 
Nakamori: What do you think about COVID-19 and the resulting lockdown of cities and nations from last year to the present day? Also, please tell us what you are currently working on or would like to work on in a situation like this.
 
Furuya: It has been exactly one year since measures to battle COVID-19 were issued here in Austria [as of March 2021]. It actually has been a very fulfilling year for me. Thanks to the lockdown, I was able to focus on work that required a lot of patience and concentration. From the non-stop and inescapable news cycle about the virus, the idea that has related to me the most is death. From the moment of birth, a person begins their journey toward death. Yet, for a period of time, there is no need to think about the idea or meaning of death, so one is not aware of death and thinks that death has nothing to do with them. One might even think that they can live forever. After the age of seventy, death creeps into our life on many more occasions, while the eventuality of our own death remains ever more present. In my case, death is neither unpleasant nor frightening, and recently I’m even starting to feel that confronting death can make one feel refreshed. There is a tall gingko tree in my garden. I used to totally ignore its existence. These days, I watch the tree change throughout the seasons and think about the fateful encounters in life. Some of us live to be thirty-two years old, others to seventy-something years old, and yet others to a thousand years old (since I was a child, I’ve heard that gingko trees can live to be a thousand years old). I spend my days meditating on the trajectory and stories of my life, while being amazed at the small miracle that I got through all the trials and tribulations in my life since leaving Japan, and that I’m still around. Since we are still required to refrain from social activities to fight the virus, this is not a bad way to spend my otherwise solitary life.
 
At the moment, I’m getting started on the production of a new photobook called First Trip to Bologna. The book consists of materials from our trip to Bologna shortly after I met Christine in 1978. I plan on using only frames from videos taken with a Super 8 camera instead of the still photos that appear in this book. I also found this film in the attic and was very surprised when I watched the digitized film on a screen. No matter how many times I watched the video, I couldn’t recollect memories from the trip. It got to the point where I doubted if I was even there with her. It’s as if days that I didn’t know existed were brought back and recreated in front of me. Since I don’t remember anything, I thought about creating a brand-new story of the Bologna trip for us. In addition, I would like to publish a collection of photos taken solely by Christine. I wonder which project would come first, but I hope to bring this photobook with me as a souvenir when I see her again. I want to leave behind records of Christine’s works for our son and his kids. For me, the days of taking photos are mostly over. From this point on, I think my job will be to work with the newly discovered materials belonging to Christine and bring them to the public as her own works as much as possible. Other than that, I would probably continue to take family photos of my son and grandchildren with a 6 by 7 camera from time to time.
 
Nakamori: Thank you very much.
 
This piece originally was published in Issue 019 of The PhotoBook Review. Translated from Japanese to English by Shiwei Yin.
 
A Japanese Photographer’s Bittersweet Archive of His Late Wife. By Yasufumi Nakamori. Aperture, September 22, 2021. 

In 1973, the photographer Seiichi Furuya left his native Japan for Europe by Trans-Siberian rail. He met Christine Gössler, a student of art history, in Austria in 1978, and after a few months’ courtship the two married. Furuya documented their bohemian life in Iron Curtain-era Europe: travel, cigarettes, apartments that still appear stylish across the distance of time. Eventually, he started an art magazine, and she was drawn to a career in the theatre. They had a baby and settled in East Germany. A few years later, Gössler died by suicide.
 
In the course of their relationship, Furuya had photographed his wife regularly, though I think it would be wrong to describe Gössler as her spouse’s muse—a term that suggests the model as object. Furuya’s images were quotidian in a way that seemed to presage our contemporary relationship to the medium. But even decades on, his late wife remains Furuya’s great subject. He has published five volumes—collectively titled “Mémoires”—containing portraits of Gössler and scenes captured from their brief life together. For his new book, “Face to Face,” Furuya returned to his archive, where he found something unexpected: images that Gössler had taken of him, sometimes documenting the very moment in which Furuya was photographing her.
 
There’s a simple elegance to the presentation of “Face to Face”: we see her, then we see him. Sometimes the two are posed against the same backdrop (a blue sofa, or the stucco wall of a house, with a flowering tree in the foreground); sometimes they’re undressed; sometimes they’re in black-and-white; sometimes they’re with other people. Often the pairings show us two vantages on a single moment: resting on a log, skis sticking out of the snowbank behind, or on a train, facing each other, an anonymous station glimpsed through the window.
 
The book is organized so that Gössler appears mostly on the verso, her husband opposite. This rhythm breaks, occasionally, suggesting that some special attention is warranted: see Furuya, nude and backlit, a shadowy form on a beautiful parquet floor, and his wife, also obscured by the contrast of light in the window behind, with her hair in a girlish side ponytail.
 
It’s hard not to be seduced by the couple: they are young, cool, dressed in chic clothing that one might mistake for contemporary. Their domestic bric-a-brac—a red plastic-topped soy-sauce decanter, blue-and-white ceramic bowls, a package of cigarettes at the ready—seems instantly recognizable to me. I was eight years old, with a bowl cut not unlike that of their son, Komyo, when this picture was taken, and even the way the sunlight filters through the lacy window panel feels somehow familiar.

 
But Gössler’s eventual death looms, even when the pictures provide us only a smiling new mother with a baby in a comical bonnet. As we watch the woman change over the years, we do what the photographer must himself be doing in revisiting the pictures: we hunt for clues. Shots that are playful, or even sexy—she’s sprawled on a bed, hands pulling her hair from her face; he’s in the same bed, a cigarette in hand—seem almost mournful. Here’s a casual nude of a pregnant Gössler, standing before a bassinet; does she look haunted, or irritated, or merely tired? Here she is a couple of years on, hair fashionably shorn, her body no longer full with child—is she worryingly thin, possibly ill? The pictures do not yield easily to our scrutiny.
 
Furuya’s act in capturing his subject is one of pride, affection, desire, and maybe possession. If it’s also an act of art, Gössler, in photographing her photographer, transforms the thing into something closer to a game, a way of showing that she sees him as clearly as he sees her.
 
How many times, trying to capture whatever it is that we all feel compelled to remember these days (an especially photogenic cappuccino, my children doing something cute) have I fumbled, making the phone turn its eye back to me? I have dozens of these accidental, unflattering self-portraits, the inconvenient by-product of our era’s almost-too-efficient technology. I wonder how Furuya felt, suddenly confronted with his younger self—long hair, turtleneck sweater, wire-rimmed glasses. I hope he felt some solace. Gössler’s pictures of him aren’t just technical blips. They’re a message, dispatched across decades: I remember, too.
 
A Photographer, Seen Through the Eyes of His Late Wife. By  Rumaan Alam. The New Yorker,
February 14, 2021

Artist page Choose Commune

Seiichi Furuya  website

Michaela Stark : Intimate, Sensual, Grotesque

 

Michaela Stark,  the 27-year-old Brisbane-born, London-based artist and designer has captivated international media with her innovative take on lingerie, which she handcrafts and sells to private clients. Using hand-dyed silk taffeta, silk organza, silk chiffon and invisible tulle, Stark offers delicate brassieres with peekaboo panels, pearl-encrusted thongs, body-sculpting corsets, and panties and bloomers trimmed with distressed cotton muslin or reams of silk ribbon.
 
But it’s the way Stark presents her work — mostly on herself — that has the knickers of the social media censors in a knot. Through self-portraits and collaborations with established photographers, Stark deploys extreme styling and body-morphing techniques to create mesmerising abstract human sculptures that, in her words, explore the issues of body dysmorphia, beauty standards, sexuality and fetish. Breasts, hips and stomach bulge out of peepholes and corsetry. Arms, legs and midriffs are tightly trussed up with nylon fishing line, evocative of a human roast.
 
 “Does it hurt?” is one of the most common questions Stark receives from her Instagram fans, who now number more than 100,000. “It doesn’t hurt — that often,” comes the answer down the line from London in late November, as she is prepping for her international exhibition debut, Stark Naked. It’s a series of images taken by Norwegian photographer Sølve Sundsbø, on show at Dover Street Market’s 3537 cultural and creative centre in Paris.
 
Stark and Sundsbø also collaborated in September in what Stark has described as her most extreme body-morphing work to date. “I kind of have a bit of a fetish for the pain, I think sometimes,” she says, adding that she felt like she was about to “throw up or pass out” at one point during the most recent shoot, with her sister on hand with water and a fan.
 
“Now that I’m in it, I want to push my body further and see how far I can go because I also love creating the imagery,” she adds. “I don’t want to Photoshop [the images]; I want it to be how it is, and I want to pull it to extremes, and so I am going tighter and tighter every time. Sometimes I get caught up in the art of it all.”
 
The art world may be loving it, but the social media gatekeepers are not. Citing violations of community standards, Instagram has repeatedly removed Stark’s posts and made threats to take down the account entirely, prompting Stark to launch a precautionary backup account.
 
Even Google issues an “explicit content” prompt in some search results. “I’ve had photos taken down that had nothing showing,” says Stark. “And I have friends on the [Instagram] moderators [team] who say sometimes it doesn’t even matter if nothing is showing: if they deem it as sexual, they deem it as sexual, and that’s it.
 
They’ll still take the image down, and there’s nothing you can do about it. It is so scary because I’ve found myself in a group in London of artists who do create provocative work, so all of us are constantly having our careers and livelihoods threatened by Instagram.”
 
 
Stark’s art is essentially a defiant middle finger to the fashion world, from which she says she felt excluded while growing up in Brisbane. At the time, she explains, she wore a 32/34FF bra size and felt “uncomfortable all the time” because she was bigger than her friends and struggled to find clothes and lingerie that fit properly.

 
After completing a bachelor of design (fashion) at the Queensland University of Technology — during which she spent a year on exchange with the Politecnico di Milano, a university in Milan that specialises in engineering, architecture and design — one of Stark’s teachers hooked her up with a three-month internship at the Paris showroom of veteran fashion agent Florence Deschamps. “It was my first ever taste of European fashion and how the fashion industry ran in Paris and in Europe,” she says. “I was sneaking into the Vivienne Westwood afterparty and just doing all these different things, and it was like, Oh my god! I was just so excited the whole time.”
 
When she came back to Brisbane, she was determined to save enough money to return to Europe as quickly as possible, so she worked two jobs while simultaneously completing her honours certificate. Her graduate collection, titled Fashion as Grotesque Spectacle, featured lingerie alongside ruched and quilted ready-to-wear pieces in flesh-coloured satin, with names such as the Saggy Skin dress and the Fatroll Jumpsuit.
 
In 2017, within a week of arriving in London, Stark landed an internship with the young multidisciplinary artist Claire Barrow. For the next six months, she moved between the studios of several emerging London fashion talents, including Ashley Williams. And then Queen Bey came calling.
 
Through a friend, Stark connected with an associate of Beyoncé’s personal stylist, Zerina Akers, who was looking for a tailor for the singer’s 2018 Apeshit video with Jay-Z. The next thing Stark knew, she was in Beyoncé’s Paris hotel room piecing together garments from the Versace home range to create a robe for the singer to wear on camera. All up, Stark spent about a year working with Beyoncé as a costume designer, personal tailor and assistant to Akers. She toured Europe and Africa, and worked on the 2020 film Black is King.
 
Stark has also worked with Marine Serre, Christian Louboutin and Cartier, all the while working on her own lingerie line behind the scenes. “Basically, I’m born to be in couture,” she says. “I love to just make clothes really, really slowly, do as much handwork on them as possible.”
 
She developed the photographic side of her art separately. It was during a late 2016 road trip along Australia’s east coast with her photographer mate Domino Aurora that Stark started learning the basics of photography and shooting Aurora in clothes from one of her graduate collections.
 
Later in her bedrooms in Paris and London, she started photographing herself in her lingerie pieces and creating content for Instagram. “I was just sewing and sewing and sewing and developing, and that’s when my practice sort of got really strong,” she says. “I’d already had a year, maybe a year and a half, of me playing around with it, and then in 2019, I just sort of went for it and started taking photos of myself, uploading all the time, and that’s when the photography met the body- morphing, and it became this whole package.”
 
Stark’s work has attracted not only a legion of online fans, but also its fair share of negative social media commentary, some of which she has archived on an Instagram Stories highlight. Some have slammed her work as “bondage pornwear” and “disfiguring”, while accusing Stark of self-hatred. Then there’s the old chestnut that is invariably trotted in any discussion about size-inclusive fashion — that it is “normalising obesity”.
 
“I do know that it’s quite extreme. It’s not only an extreme shape to put your body in physically; it’s also a way of seeing your body and exposing yourself in a way that not really anyone has done,” says Stark, of the flak she receives.“But I get messages from other people saying it helped them see their body shape in a different way and see their curves and their fat as something that could be beautiful, which I think is crazy and amazing because it did start as just a project for me, for myself, alone in my bedroom in Paris or my studio in London.

 
“I want [my clients] to feel the same way that I do in my pieces,” she continues, “which is to feel that they love it, that they feel sexy, that they feel amazing and confident. Then at the end of the day, the hate online or the negative comments don’t phase us because we know how great we feel and we know how great we look, and for every bad comment, there are 100 good comments.”
 
Michaela Stark: Couture lingerie designer and body-morphing artist. By  Patty Huntington. Harper’s Bazaar Australia, Jan/Febr, 2022.

In Michaela Stark’s collections, beauty is distorted. Her sculpted lingerie blurs the boundaries of the sensual and the grotesque, creating extreme shapes and eye-watering contortions. Fat bulges, flesh is compressed, and limbs are strung up like joints of meat. On the skin itself, pain can be seen everywhere: through welts, scars, and in purpling, blood-starved complexions. But for the artist and couturier, these images are about much more than provocation. In fact, they are a vivid, mocking exploration of the lengths we go to in the name of conventional beauty norms, and the discomfort – sometimes agony – we endure to make our bodies seem desirable.
 
Australia-born Stark began her career as a seamstress. Despite finding success – and working with Beyoncé repeatedly, on music videos and her Black Is King tour – she began focusing on her own more conceptual lingerie projects in 2018. Using herself as model, Stark would squeeze herself into increasingly constrictive corsetry, creating bulbous, sensuous shapes with her own body. Part performance, part “fashion experiment”, these designs were part of a lifelong fascination with the way we perceive our own bodies.
 

Stark’s latest project, Stark Naked, is a continuation of this work. Currently on show at Dover Street Market’s 3537 in Paris, the exhibition sees the artist collaborate with photographer Sølve Sundsbø for a series of lavish, if unsettling, imagery. “This collection was very much about me creating couture lingerie for different bodies, not just myself,” Stark tells AnOther. Instead, she worked with models Jade ‘O’ Belle and Dodo Potato for six months, creating couture lingerie that was tailored to their curves, and inspired by their personal relationships with their bodies.
 
The resulting pieces – made from invisible tulle, silk chiffon and grosgrain ribbon – are hand-dyed to look like skin, giving an effect of engorged flesh and mysterious bodily growths. “We treated the [fabrics] to look like skin, and then added pleats and embroidery on top to reference the way that the skin wrinkles under the corset, like saggy, wrinkly skin,” Stark explains. The aim, she adds, was to create a veil of uncanny ambiguity. “It’s all very non-descript, so I think I could see something in it but then someone else looks at it and see something different.”

 
For such an intimate project, it was vital to find the right photographer. “I’ve had a hard time working with photographers in the past, because I feel like my work is so much about having control over your body and the image you’re projecting,” Stark says. “That’s why my work is so powerful, I think – because it’s not just putting models in underwear. It’s allowing them to have control over what their body looks like.” After meeting Norwegian photographer Sundsbø on a shoot, the pair instantly connected: Stark felt comfortable being vulnerable around him, and found him to be sensitive, diligent and considerate when it came to her overall vision.
 
Sundsbø is equally positive about his experience with Stark. “Michaela is very focused and knows exactly what she wants to say. That’s very special,” he tells AnOther. “Even in 2021 there are taboos and norms to be questioned and broken. She does that in such a brave, interesting and beautiful way ... What makes her work unique for me is how much she offers of herself in such a fearless way. She makes these ephemeral beautiful pieces of clothing and brings in a hyper-real world of flesh and brutal honesty. Her own flesh and her own truth about her body.”

 
For Stark, these experiments with couture lingerie have helped her rebuild a more loving, accepting relationship with herself. After experiencing body dysmorphia as a teenager, she became obsessive about the flaws of her body. It was only after she decided to embrace them – even boldly accentuate them – for her art, that she began to change her view. “I’ve come to appreciate different parts of my body,” she says, “not just the fat, but the hair, the pimples, the stretch marks, and any sort of imperfection. [My work] has helped me see them in a completely different way: I’ve stopped obsessing over the surface things, and started thinking about my body more deeply, and getting inspired by it more deeply.”
 
Stark Naked is running at DSM’s 3537 in Paris until December 19.
 
Stark Naked: Intimate Images of Michaela Stark’s Sensual, Grotesque Designs. By  Dominique Sisley. Another Magazine, December 13, 2021. 

Few have made a name for sensuous, body-positive lingerie quite like Michaela Stark. With her latest collection — titled Stark Naked and on show at the Dover Street Market-affiliated 3537 Gallery in Paris until 19 December — the couture artist pushes her practice to its furthest point yet, creating pieces that contort the body into shapes so otherworldly that they’re almost unrecognisable. In the Marais space, these chiffon, tulle and organza garments hang like sculptures; their transformative potential demonstrated in a new series of images created in collaboration with photographer Sølve Sundsbø and makeup artist Kevin Cordo. This is also where, on Tuesday night, Michaela staged a performance, taking a pair of scissors to an iconic Jean Paul Gaultier cone corset (with l’enfant terrible’s support, of course!) live on stage, before wearing the reworked piece in her signature body morphing style.

 
Michaela’s work has always been about highlighting perceived imperfections, with the body becoming as much a part of the final look as the lingerie itself. For this exhibition, however, she decided to show the garments separate from their worn context, so as not to distract from the hours’ worth of intricate handcraft invested in each piece. Body positivity remains an important message, but rather than accept the body as it is naturally, this is a collection created with the intention of transforming it beyond familiar perception. It’s an attempt to present human bodies as alien lifeforms, altered and exaggerated to extremity through humble cloth.
 
The exhibition also marks the first time that Michaela has taken her work offline. While she has always struggled against Instagram censorship, the platform has long been the primary way for her to showcase her work. Until now. Indeed, this collection is a testament to Michaela’s versatility as an artist and designer, and her ability to create work that feels as at home in a formal gallery setting as it does on an iPhone screen.
 
How would you introduce your latest collection, Stark Naked?
 
 
 
MS :
It's a collection of couture lingerie that has been designed for specific models — me, Jade 'O' Belle and Dodo Potato. At the start of the year, I completed my Second Skin collection, which was all about me. I wanted to expand that. I started working with Jade 'O' Belle really slowly to develop this couture look on her then the exhibition came and that's when I brought in Dodo. We have been working on the shapes for months, making them so that they morph the body so extremely that you almost can't recognise it anymore. It's been designed to highlight the imperfections of our bodies; the things that we have been previously taught to hide.
 
For this collection, I found a lot of inspiration in the skin and the flesh. I used silk organza, silk chiffon, and tulle that had all been dyed to either match the models' skin or to replicate aging or decaying skin. I've included embroidery that is reminiscent of wrinkles, stretch marks or veins. It's about referencing the body in a nondescript way, and allowing the pieces to stand as artworks on their own. In the images, Kevin Cordo did the body makeup, highlighting the red marks and all the lines that would be left from wearing a corset. That really exaggerated the shape.
 
This exaggeration through makeup gives the images this otherworldly quality. Is that the direction your work is going in?
 
MS :
Yeah. A lot of people put my work into the category of body positivity. It is, for sure, but a lot of the time body positivity is about celebrating the body as it is naturally. My work rarely shows the natural body. It's about accentuating the body into such a deformed shape that it's not natural anymore; it’s quite otherworldly, in fact. I've always loved this idea of fantasy. Fashion is fantasy, couture especially. I would love to create new worlds that you can experience in real life. Step by step, I'm bringing my work into the real world and I think it's going to become more fantastical — it's quite shocking to see the body morphed in real life, as opposed to on Instagram where we are already so used to seeing bodies manipulated with tools like FaceTune.

 
 
Do you have a favourite way of presenting your work?
 
MS :
I'm starting to get really into the idea of performance. I started off by showing my work on Instagram and doing it from the privacy of my bedroom. I didn’t have to actually show anyone in real life and I was fully in control. Now I'm slowly starting to let go of control a little bit so that I can perform in real life and show my work in this whole new perspective. I think that's only going to evolve. I'm testing the limits of how I can show my work in real life.
 
Your work is very much about how garments interact with the body, but in this exhibition the garments are presented more like sculptures and separate from the body. How do you think the context changes the way your work is perceived?
 
MS :
My pieces are designed so intrinsically with the body, but what I find is that sometimes when I show my pieces this way then the beauty of the piece gets lost. I focus on the tiniest, tiniest details in my garments, because I think they’re what add beauty to something. Sometimes when you put the corsets on, they get swallowed by the body and the real impact lies in how the body has been manipulated and is being shown. That's why I wanted to show my pieces off the body here. But they still refer to it so strongly that they almost look like living things. There’s a real sense of movement to them — there’s always something human and fleshy.
 
What do you want people to feel when they see this collection?
 
MS :
 
I want them to feel something. Someone commented on my Instagram the other day saying: "This is disgusting. I feel nothing". I get so many mixed reactions to my work, but I just want people to feel something — whether it's hate or love is up to them. I love that people have strong reactions to my work. If you're not pissing some people off, then I feel like you're not making progress.
 
Stark Naked at 35-37 rue des Francs-Bourgeois, 75004 Paris until 19 December.
 
Michaela Stark’s new designs morph the body to alien extremes. By Sophie Wilson.  i-D, December 10, 2021.

Historically, when it comes to picking out lingerie, most of us have been conditioned to look for the most flattering options, with garments that lift and support, highlight our ‘best bits’, and definitely don’t dig into our flesh all high on the agenda. It goes without saying that these outdated ideals of perfection, imposed on us by our patriarchal overlords and the mainstream media, are complete and utter bullshit – our lumps, bumps, and rolls are not the ‘imperfections’ we have been led to believe they are, but a completely normal side effect of being a human with a body, and even something to be celebrated.
 
Doing just that is rising Australia-born, Paris-based designer Michaela Stark, whose unconventional, couture-level lingerie accentuates and highlights the fleshy form and folds of the body. Crafted from delicate lace, silk, and chiffon, her corsets and bustiers are detailed with criss-crossing ribbons, straps, and seams that cut into their wearers’ breasts, torsos, and bums, with the soft, distorted mounds they create often feeling somewhere in the realm of sculpture.
 
With Stark’s namesake label born from her frustrations at not being able to find decent bras in her hometown (“an outlet store called ‘Big Girls Don’t Cry (Anymore)’ was the only place in my whole city that sold my size, but despite the name of the store, I cried literally every time I went there”), the designer started out making simple silk knickers and bloomers. Over time, her work evolved into the body-morphing styles currently making waves on Instagram.
 
Inspiration, she explains, comes from her own body hang-ups. “I’m inspired by all the parts of my body I feel insecure about. For me, that’s my stomach, my ‘love handles’, my ‘hip dips’, my boobs, the cellulite on my thighs, my butt and… I also want to say the tops of my arms, but this is a relatively recent thing,” she says, adding that working through her feelings of insecurity is a major part of her design process. “It can be an emotional process, as some days I just want to avoid my reflection altogether.”
 
Counting Beyoncé as a fan, after she created looks for 2018 video “Apeshit” and upcoming visual album Black is King, later this year Stark is also set to open her first exhibition. Here, we get to know her a little better.
 
 

 
Hey Michaela! Could you tell me a little about the themes of your work and what it’s all about? 
 
Michaela Stark: My work is about celebrating the parts of the body that society usually makes us feel insecure about, through lingerie that accentuates the ‘imperfections’ of the body – the fat rolls, bulges, cellulite, uneven breasts, body hair etc. My aim is to counteract all the prescribed beauty norms that have been force fed to us through the fashion and beauty industries.
 
How did you get your start in fashion? 
 
Michaela Stark: I started out as a seamstress in London, working in-house for several young British fashion labels. It was really exciting for me at the time, as I was so young and had just graduated from fashion school in Australia. Being thrown into the London scene like this really opened my eyes up to the opportunities of the industry and the endless possibilities within  it. 
 
Eventually, I started working with celebrity stylists as a personal tailor and costume designer, which gave me so many majorly exciting opportunities, like going on tour with Beyoncé and Jay Z, and working with big fashion brands to design and tailor garments seen on a world scale. I think mostly though, it gave the skills to be able to sew intricate and very technical garments for an array of body types – not just fashion models. 
 
Why did you make the move from clothing into lingerie?
 
Michaela Stark: I’ve always loved lingerie – it makes me feel sexy and just gives me a lot of confidence. When I’m wearing it, I feel like I’m playing out a fantasy, almost tapping into an alter-ego. Being a plus-size girl, whose 32FF breasts came pretty much right on puberty, I’d always felt a bit left out of the lingerie game. From the age of 14-19 I had to shop at an outlet story called ‘Big Girls Don’t Cry (Anymore)’ because it was the only place in the city that sold my size. As I’m sure you can imagine, stores like this don’t stock the beautiful, delicate lingerie that I so desperately desired, and every experience going there was totally mortifying.
 
 
Can you tell me a little about how you create your lingerie? What is the process behind it?
 
Michaela Stark: Each piece is completely one-of-a-kind and can take up to a month to make because they’re so intricate. I guess you could say I’m working as a ‘counter-couturier’ of sorts. Couturiers engineer their garments to solely focus on hiding and enhancing the body. My work is not so much the hiding – it’s more enhancing, enhancing, enhancing! I use the same techniques couturiers use to make the parts we usually don’t want others to see bigger and more prominent. I want to celebrate the body, not hide it away.
 
In terms of aesthetics, I would say my lingerie is unapologetically feminine. The pieces are soft, romantic, and colourful, and I love to use delicate silks and very feminine, sensual silhouettes. It’s really important to me that each piece is specifically designed to perfectly fit and complement the body of the person who is going to wear it, whether that’s myself or a client.

 
Where do you find inspiration?
 
Michaela Stark: I mostly use myself as a model and I’m inspired by all the parts of my body that I feel insecure about – working through my feelings is a major part of my design process. I always start with my own body and a loosely fitting garment, which I drape over myself while looking in the mirror, although some days I just want to avoid my reflection altogether. When I’ve draped the garment over myself, I try to sculpt it to accentuate the part I feel most insecure about in that moment. I’ll continue to manipulate my body until I feel I’ve made my ‘imperfections’ look beautiful. When I feel happy with my cellulite or fat rolls or whatever, then I know I have my final shape and can move on to the pattern cutting part. 
 
You talk about feeling insecure about your body, but your pictures evoke a huge amount of confidence. How do you channel this energy when you’re being photographed?
 
Michaela Stark: Wearing lingerie is kind of like wearing armour for me. It makes me feel confident and allows me to channel this fantasy alter-ego version of myself. My photographs, which are usually self-portraits, are as much a part of my art as the lingerie is. By the time I’ve reached this stage, I’ve already been through all the emotional labour. I’ve tackled my insecurities and created a garment that allows me to feel beautiful in my own skin, so in the photos I emanate a sense of confidence because I really am feeling confident. It also helps that I’m taking the photo – it means I’m in control of the image and of how my body and sexuality is going to be portrayed. It’s important I feel confident in the photos, because the whole point is to help others who see my work to feel safe about their own insecurities and imperfections. I hope my confidence rubs off on them!

 
 
What about when you collaborate with a photographer?
 
Michaela Stark: Oh there’s a huge difference, and you can really see it in the images. My work is already quite vulnerable and it can have a lot of sexual connotations, so when someone else photographs me, I feel like it’s very easy for me to become an object of desire. I am modelling, almost naked, for someone else, and they’re pushing their vision of beauty on me – I’m no longer in control of how my body and sexuality is going to be portrayed. But it’s nice to give up this control sometimes, and I love seeing myself through someone else’s lens. It just has to be the right team, and a photographer who’s willing to understand my perspective and hear my creative input.
 
The way you present your lingerie and images feels incredibly sculptural to me. Is this something intentional?
 
Michaela Stark: I’m actually working on an exhibition where I’ll be hanging and selling my lingerie as sculptures, so you’re spot on the money. Inside Me will be shown through Gillian Jason Gallery in London at the end of the year, in collaboration with Alina Zamanova, a painter and sculptor from Kiev. After I’ve worn an item I’ve made, and photographed myself in it, I don’t consider it an item of clothing, but a sculpture that reveals a certain part of my body and my mind. I feel that, even without a body inside, they can stand as beautiful art works that are as intimate as a nude photograph. 
 
Given social media’s censorship rules, it must be hard to present the kind of work you make. How do you navigate this?
 
Michaela Stark: It’s insanely difficult! I think this a big challenge for most artists trying to liberate the female body. At this stage, Instagram removes pretty much any photo I upload, even if there is no nudity. They have absolute power to police my body however they like. The sad truth of the matter is that women, and plus-size women particularly, are being censored more than anyone else. It’s sad because I think the fact that they have this power means artists are forced to comply by their rules.
 
When it comes to your clients, who is the person you’re designing for?
 
Michaela Stark: I love the challenge of designing for other people. It’s not something that I do regularly at the moment, but definitely something I’m working towards. It’s quite intimate to think about what someone else is going to want to wear, and what will make them feel beautiful. Beyoncé has been pretty much the only client to date I’ve had since launching my own brand! Now, I want to throw myself into it, and start learning about other people’s flaws and insecurities. If I could regularly design for other people like I do for myself, it would add a whole new dimension to my work.
 
Michaela Stark’s lingerie accentuates body parts we’re conditioned to hide. By Emma Elizabeth Davidson. Dazed, July 30, 2020. 

Michaela Stark website

Michaela Stark Instagram