Masahisa Fukase’s *Family* gathers a sustained portrait of the Fukase family and its photographic setting in Bifuka, a small town in northern Hokkaido. From 1971 to 1989, Fukase returned from Tokyo to the studio run by his family, using its interior, a large-format Anthony view camera, and the changing line-up of relatives as the framework for a series shaped by time, repetition, and loss. The project is inseparable from the family’s history: for three generations, the Fukases operated a photography studio, until bankruptcy brought its closure in 1989 and the family dispersed.

The book’s method is both formal and deeply personal. It opens with an image of the studio, followed by 31 family portraits arranged chronologically. Across the sequence, Fukase sometimes introduces outside models and comic intrusions, setting humor against the unavoidable diminution of the group. The portraits therefore do more than record resemblance or kinship. They register absences as they accumulate, and make the photographic studio itself a stage on which family continuity—and its failure—can be observed.

Fukase’s own words are central to the work’s severe meditation on photography. He describes the camera as a device that archives death: a means of freezing images even as the people before it move toward disappearance. That tension gives *Family* its particular gravity, while the recurring setting and changing cast make chronology visible without reducing the series to documentary record.

Originally released in 1991 as Fukase’s last book, this 2019 MACK publication presents the sequence in an 80-page hardback edition and includes Fukase’s extensive text alongside a contemporary essay by Tomo Kosuga. For collectors, its importance lies in the unusually close union of family history, photographic inheritance, and book structure: a final, rigorously ordered portrait in which the medium’s promise to preserve becomes an inquiry into what preservation cannot prevent.