In 1978, just months after meeting Christine Gössler in Graz, Seiichi Furuya documented their first trip together, to Bologna, on Super 8. In 2018 he found the film rolls in his attic. One was a recording of that first trip, made a few weeks after they met, a trip he had completely forgotten. He began extracting stills from the film, frame by frame, and these images compose First Trip to Bologna 1978. The same book presents a newly edited version of Last Trip to Venice 1985, his photographs from their very last journey together, first self-published in 2002. The two series hold a recovered beginning beside a revisited ending.
Furuya left Japan for Europe in 1973 on the Trans-Siberian train, settling first in Vienna before moving to Graz, where he met Christine in 1978; they married that May. Christine studied art history and worked for the radio, making documentary programs. After the birth of their son in 1981, she became increasingly involved in theatre, and as she devoted herself to acting lessons she began to show signs of schizophrenia. She took her own life in East Berlin in 1985. Since her death, Furuya has never stopped revisiting his archive, in the five-volume Mémoires series, published between 1989 and 2010, and in Face to Face (Chose Commune, 2020).
The book is edited by Cécile Poimboeuf-Koizumi, designed by Bureau Kayser, and published in a first edition. The 192-page softcover otabind volume measures 16.5 × 24.4 cm and contains 122 film stills and 39 photographs, with text in English, French, Japanese, and German. It was published on 10 March 2022.
