First Trip to Bologna 1978 / Last Trip to Venice 1985

In 1973, Seiichi Furuya left Japan for Europe on board of the Trans-Siberian train. He arrived in Austria where he first settled in Vienna, before moving to Graz where he met Christine Gössler in 1978. From this day forward, he started photographing her, in the intimacy of their home in Graz but also during their travels abroad — to Germany, England, Italy…and Japan, their most distant destination. 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 the world of theatre. As she was devoting herself to her acting lessons, she started to show signs of schizophrenia. Christine committed suicide in East Berlin in 1985.

Since Christine’s disappearance, Furuya has never stopped revisiting his archive. This initiative was presented in a series of five books entitled Mémoires, published between 1989 and 2010, and in Face to Face, published by Chose Commune in 2020. In 2018, Seiichi Furuya found super 8 film rolls in his attic. One of them was a recording of the very first trip he made with Christine, in Bologna in 1978 a few weeks after they had met. As an attempt to remember a trip he had completely forgotten about, Seiichi Furuya started extracting stills from the film, frame by frame. These images compose his new series First Trip to Bologna 1978. Together with this series, in the same book, we are releasing a newly edited version of Last Trip to Venice 1985, which was first self-published in 2002. This series presents photographs from Seiichi and Christine’s very last trip, before Christine took her own life.