Masahisa Fukase's Family at Masculinities: Liberation through Photography

Produced over nearly two decades, Masahisa Fukase’s moving series Family uses the backdrop of his family-run photography studio in Hokkaido, northern Japan to construct highly performative yet formal photographs of members of his family in which semi-clad young women often appear striking deliberately comedic or subversive poses. Taken from the front and back, and often including the artist himself alongside his relatives, the women are routinely placed at the left edge of the group giving rise to uncomfortable tensions of hierarchy, equality and dominance. In positioning the women as ‘extras’ or outsiders, or showing them striking ludicrous poses, the photographs recall pejorative visual tropes and culturally specific contexts – such as the historically patriarchal attitude towards women in Japan – and meditate on the overt ways in which women are still systematically subordinated to men.

What does it mean to be a man today? The Barbican's Masculinities: Liberation through Photography considers how masculinity has been coded, performed, and socially constructed from the 1960s to the present day.