Seiichi Furuya’s photographic work is acknowledged worldwide, dealing as it does with the act of remembrance in images with such tenacity. Time and time again he returns to the vast archive of images he accrued between 1978 and 1988, the years spent with his wife Christine, whose life was cut short. Five books by the photographer have been published since 1989, all under the same title “Mémoires“, created in memory of his wife.
The exhibition at FOTOHOF>LIBRARY looks at the first artist’s book entitled “Mémoires 1978-1988“, which was published by Camera Austria in Graz in 1989 and doubled as the catalogue for the eponymous exhibition at the Neue Galerie Graz by the then 40-year-old photographer.
Four years after Christine Furuya-Gössler committed suicide, a work of remembrance on public display unfolds here in the form of diary-like photo scenarios whose spectrum ranges from general photographs of brief domestic happiness with their son Komyo Klaus to the unsparingly recorded existential moments of a distinctive individual.
Both the book and the exhibition installation are seen as a separate format and open process, one which over the past twenty years has yielded many surprising variations. For the Library wall Seiichi Furuya has recreated a replica of the legendary first book, which as a result is once again subjected to the artist’s review.

Seiichi Furuya: Mémoires 1978 – 1988. With essays by Monika Faber, Werner Fenz, Christine Frisinghelli and Wilfried Skreiner. Graz: Edition Camera Austria / Neue Galerie am Landesmuseum Joanneum 1989.