Why Dresden – Seiichi Furuya

Seiichi Furuya’s Dresden photographs from 1984/85 are a most unlikely document — a view of daily life in the latter days of the GDR recorded by a Japanese photographer, who had been a major player in the photography scene in Austria since the beginning of the 1980s. 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.