Seiichi Furuya’s Dresden photographs from 1984 are a most unlikely document — a view of daily life in the latter days of the GDR recorded by a Japanese photographer. Furuya came to Dresden as an interpreter for a Japanese construction company. His pictures are private – a young family in an intimate setting, their deep-seated anxieties and moments of happiness — and it is more in passing that he records everyday life and society. His view from the outside, a stranger’s way of seeing things, has no equivalent in the art photography of the GDR. In 2015 an exhibition project brought Furuya back to Dresden, where he took a series of new pictures: photographs of familiar places, onto which capitalist life has now inscribed itself, thirty years on, and of the Pegida demonstrations that have completely transformed the image of the city.
“Why Dresden” was designed by Helmut Völter and published by Spector Books, Leipzig, with a text by Manfred Wiemer. The book has been reviewed by Silke Hohmann for Monopol magazine (02/2017). Read more.
A book presentation will be held on 12 April 2017 at Kunsthaus Dresden at 7pm. Seiichi Furuya will be present. Further information.