Masahisa Fukase:

Masahisa Fukases Solitude of Ravens was shot between 1976 and 1982 in the
wake of his divorce from Yko Wanibe. The visual narrative of the series of
photographs is formed around ravens. I think that the genre is shown are nature
due to the ravens being in their environment and its also partly autobiographical
as although the photographs dont show Fukase, the autobiographical-ness of it
comes from the back story where Fukase was known for taking such happy
photographs but after the divorce his photographs took a turn and had a
negative feel to them.
This was reflecting the darkened vision of the photographer himself as each
frame seems to contain come kind of pain as after his divorce all he probably
would have felt is pain and grief at the breakdown of his marriage. I think that
this expressionism of personal pain and grief is what is being communicated in
his photographs and the idea of loneliness is also there as most of the time the
photographs, although a group of ravens show them and just them like theyre
being isolated from the rest of the world. As the frames are black and white it
gives it more of a horror look to the photographs like you is in some sort of
nightmare as some people see the raven as a bird of dark times.
These photographs reveal that the techniques used on the film camera were
applied in the dark room after the photographs had been taken. These
techniques include multiple exposure printing, enlarging a tiny portion of the
negative to emphasize a particular part of the photograph or perhaps to get rid
of unwanted objects or objects that could distract the viewer. In some of the
photographs you can clearly see dodging and burning halos and glowing
outlines.
The photographs of the ravens would have been very difficult to achieve as you
would have to focus the camera on the small, moving, black subject being the
raven in almost total darkness and setting the exposures would have been
challenging too.
I think that this has influenced me as I want to do some sort of nature
photography in my final assignment. However, I dont think Ill do anything to do
with any kind of animals but more so to do with flowers but Ill try to look at
isolation of this in some of my photographs and look to doing some in black and
white and to Photoshop them with some of the darkroom techniques as I wont
be using a film camera for this but I can still try to get some of the same effects.