In 1978, Christine Furuya-Gössler began making photographs. Seven years later, in 1985, she died in East Berlin. The work she left behind has remained largely unseen: she was known, if at all, through the photographs her husband Seiichi Furuya made of her, in which she appears as subject rather than author. Photographs (1978–1985), the first book devoted to her own pictures and the first posthumous collection of them, reverses that arrangement. Published by Chose Commune in June 2025, with editing and sequencing by Cécile Poimboeuf-Koizumi and design by Poimboeuf-Koizumi with Perrine Serre, it gathers more than 120 plates made between the year she met Seiichi Furuya and the year she took her own life.
The photographs record a private world: family, celebrations and shared occasions, travel. What distinguishes them is not the subject matter but the stance. Furuya-Gössler holds her distance, even from those close to her, and especially from anyone attempting to fix her in turn; a pronounced melancholy runs through the images without ever yielding to full explanation. The book’s sequencing draws out this reserve, so that the life documented and the perspective documenting it never quite coincide.
Trained in art history and later a radio documentary maker, Furuya-Gössler turned to theatre after her son’s birth in 1981, the same period in which symptoms of schizophrenia emerged. The photographs belong to those overlapping years, and they are not illustrations of an illness. They are the work of a deliberate observer whose attention to her own reality was steady and unsentimental.
For collectors, the significance is documented rather than asserted: here is a body of work never exhibited during the photographer’s lifetime, assembled for the first time as a monograph. The volume is printed in a section-sewn OTA-bound softcover at 17 × 24 cm, 208 pages, with captions and apparatus in English, French and Japanese—an edition built for reading as much as for looking.
