In 1973 Seiichi Furuya left Japan for Austria. 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.
Christine studied art history and worked in radio, making documentary programs. After the birth of their son in 1981, she became increasingly involved in the theatre scene. While taking acting lessons Christine started to show signs of schizophrenia. She 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 which was a recording of the first trip he made with Christine to 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 make his new series First Trip to Bologna 1978. Together with this series is a newly edited version of Last Trip to Venice 1985, first self-published in 2002 to present photographs from Seiichi and Christine’s very last trip, before Christine took her own life.
