Christine Furuya-Gössler’s photographs are a powerful memento of a life cut short

Seiichi Furuya is an image maker who, over the past few decades, has become well loved for the intimate portraits of his late wife Christine Furuya-Gössler during the seven years they spent together, first as a couple, then husband and wife and later as parents. Defined by their soft mundanity and Seiichi’s clear dedication to the life he and Christine had built together, his images are backdropped by the strange brutalist beauty of East Germany not long before the wall fell. His work has always felt like a stolen, precious insight into the life of a small family existing on the cusp of history. But the instance of their later context – Christine took her own life in 1985 after years of mental health struggles – has further imbued the images with an unshakable sense of sadness.

What many people who are familiar with Seiichi’s work may not know is that soon after meeting Seiichi in 1978, Christine herself picked up a camera and began creating. This instance, and the works that came from it, are something that Seiichi and the publisher Choose Commune have now spent years trying to shed light on: remedying the lack of awareness of Christine’s short-spanning yet distinctive body of work. Now, 40 years after Christine’s passing, comes a new book released by Choose Commune, Christine Furuya-Gössler Photographs (1978–1985), which houses over 130 of Christine’s photographs and marks the first publication of solely her work. It follows Face to Face, the publisher’s 2020 publication of Christine and Seiichi’s portraits of each other, the first publicly available insight into Christine’s work.

“When Seiichi told us he had discovered a much larger archive of Christine’s photographs, it felt essential to shift the spotlight onto her – to reveal her not just as a muse, but as an artist in her own right,” says Cécile Poimboeuf-Koizumi, founder of Choose Commune and editor of the new book. To enhance the intimacy of Christine’s work and to draw attention to the short period of time she was creating, each image is organised chronologically and dated. “The dates also give the sequence a diaristic quality, showing how rapidly she evolved as a photographer in just seven years,” says Cécile. “If you look closely, the layout reflects this progression: the early images are printed smaller, and as time passes – and as Christine’s illness becomes more present – the photographs gradually grow in size, ending in full-bleed pages.”

So rarely feeling staged, the images throughout the book have the power to speak volumes about something quiet – the minutiae of daily living and the imposed innocence of parenthood. Fruit and vegetables punctuate the pages, slices of watermelon next to a coffee on a sunny day, piles of radishes and an aubergine on the counter next to a sink, droplets of water suggesting they’ve just been washed. Images of Komyo, Christine and Seiichi’s son, a sweet window into the daily existence of a child at the turn of the 20th century. He poses as a ghost (sticking with tradition with eye-holes cut out of a bedsheet), opens a door while wrapped in a 90s puffer and stripy hat, and sits in a carrier on Christine’s back, the flash of her camera illuminating his face in the mirror, a precursor to another day of mother and son spent (quite literally) joined at the hip.

As well as reflecting their shared family life, for Seiichi, many of the photographs reveal Christine’s inner-self, her personality and demeanour, even the way she held her camera. “She never aggressively imposed herself on her subjects. Instead, she always maintained a position of quiet restraint, observing from a slight distance,” says Seiichi. “She held the camera gently, always keeping the same calm and respectful distance from the people or things she chose to photograph.” Seiichi adds that Christine would often take two photographs consecutively, seemingly haunted by “a lingering uncertainty”. There was one exception to this predisposition, however; when Christine captured Seiichi asleep. Here, Christine used a macro lens, leaving only a few centimetres between the lens and Seiichi’s face. Seiichi recalls it was “almost as if she were conducting a CT scan”. He continues: “It felt as though she was trying to peer into my mind and understand what I was thinking – trying to capture something invisible inside me.”

When asked what it felt like, as a photographer, to have the camera turned on himself, Seiichi says that whilst it hasn’t happened often, he has no particular aversion to it. “That was especially true when Christine photographed me,” Seiichi continues. “She never once insisted on taking pictures or asked to do so – it always happened naturally and quietly, as part of the flow of the moment.” The process was simple, Seiichi would stop, look at Christine, with her never – bar once asking him to remove his glasses – requesting his changing position or expression. Much like the photos of him sleeping, Seiichi saw this creative process as a cipher for their relationship, a new means for connection and communication. “The photographs themselves weren’t what mattered,” Seiichi says. “Rather, I believe we were engaging in a kind of silent conversation – brief as it may have been – through the act of photographing one another.”

By 1983, Christene had all but stopped taking photographs due to increasing ill-mental health, and even when in 1985 she did briefly pick her camera back up, Seiichi says that she no longer turned her camera on him. “In other words, she had stopped engaging in that silent dialogue with me,” he says. Christine Furuya-Gössler Photographs (1978–1985) is a moving testament to the self actualising power of creation, and the traces of existence that the oft-photographed Christine left behind, with her own mind, her own eyes and her own hands.