Number of works: 75; Size of work: 16.5 x 24.8 cm (6.5 x 9.77 inch); Technique: gelatin-silver print and Type C print; All photographs are mounted onto the aluminum plates (1 mm).
... The huge enlargements of the "Limes (The Wall)*" series have a set of seventy-five small photographs of his life in Berlin in a line along the bottom. There is a snap of Christine and their son in an airplane, street scenes, and a politician's face on the television, a swastika, a church and a sky. These pictures show the various faces of society. The emotions and events of daily life, political, economic and social conditions are all seen through the filter of Seiichi Furuya's consciousness, becoming visually interconnected.
His pictures of the wall, soaring between East and West Berlin, show it for what it is, a physical border that split two countries and at the same time, he shows the borders that exist within himself. The wall that separates two countries, the walls of the hospital, the wall of death that wrenches people apart so cruelly. He remains conscious of the border that separates two people, but in order to understand, to Iove, to remember, he Iooks steadily through his Jens. His handling of his wife's death is not merely an autobiographical or confessional work, it questions the multiple borders that exist universally within all people.
© Michiko Kasahara, 1993 (Curator, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography)
An excerpt from a text “Border/Borderless” in the exhibition catalogue “Border/Borderless, Japanese Contemporary Photography”, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, 1993, Tokyo
