1986 Facets of Modernism: Photographs from the San Fran-
cisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art, San Francisco, California
1989–1990Czech Modernism: 1900–1945, Museum of Fine
Arts, Houston, Texas and traveling
1990 Les avantgardes teche`ques, Arles, Texas
1994 Czech and Slovak Photography from Between the Wars
to the Present, Fitchburg Art Museum, Fitchburg, Mas-
sachusetts
Further Reading
Coke, Van Deren, and Diana Dupont.Facets of Modern-
ism: Photographs from the San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art. New York: Hudson Hills, 1986.
Tucker, Anne. Czech Modernism: 1900–1945. Houston:
Fine Arts Museum, 1989.
Dufek, Antonin.Jaromı ́r Funke (1896–1945), Pioneering
Avant-Garde Photography. Moravian Gallery, 1996.SEIICHI FURUYA
Japanese
During his early studies in architecture, Seiichi Fur-
uya began photographing the everyday aspects of
life in Tokyo. This relationship with his camera led
to him giving up architecture and devoting himself
entirely to the study and practice of photography.
But it was not until he left Japan for Vienna, Aus-
tria that his professional life in photography began.
From the mid-1970s through today, Furuya has
developed work that ranges from the deeply perso-
nal, evolving images of his wife, family, and home,
to the changing political and environmental land-
scapes that surrounded him in Eastern Europe.
Furuya’s work captures notions of living both geo-
graphically and emotionally on life’s borders, and is
punctuated by the moment the Berlin Wall fell. He
continues to engage viewers with photographic
insights about home, memory, and the ways of
revisiting and interpreting the divisions of space
and ethos.
Born in Japan, Furuya moved to Vienna after his
photography studies in 1973. After two years in
Vienna, he moved to Graz, Austria, where he met
Christine Go ̈ssler, who immediately became the
subject of many of his photographs. They wed in
1978, during Furuya’s first return to Japan since his
departure. Upon their return to Graz, Furuya be-
came more involved with other artists and in seek-
ing exhibition possibilities. In 1980, photographs of
Go ̈ssler were published in the magazineCamera
Austria. That same year, Furuya spent time in
Amsterdam, where he documented the coexistence
of families and strangers, often distressed or dis-
placed on the city’s streets. Although a more distant
view of the conflict between the simultaneous close-
ness and isolation involved in relationships, these
photographs paralleled the resolution Furuya may
have sought in his images of Go ̈ssler. Following
Amsterdam, Furuya relocated to Vienna, where he
and Go ̈ssler had a son, Komyo Klaus, in 1981.
While establishing himself in the Austrian and
European worlds of photography, Furuya also
remained committed to the work of other Japanese
photographers, and encouraged their involvement
in the European art world. He introduced such
figures as Nobuyoshi Araki, Daido Moriyama,
and Shomei Tomatsu to the exhibition and publish-
ing practices in which he was flourishing. During
this time, Furuya continued to photograph Go ̈ssler
while carrying on with his own journey as a Japa-
nese foreign national living and working in Cold
War Eastern Europe. Mental and physical borders
and boundaries appear in his 1981–1983 works
entitledNational Frontier.For this work, Furuya
used the idea of himself as the traveling, displaced
photographic eye to capture a story about the bor-
ders between Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary,
and Yugoslavia. The story consists not only of the
physical evidence of division and boundaries, but of
the human response of inhabiting a space that is
constantly divided, questioning whether an identifi-
able place exists at all. Furuya’s own interactions
with the fractured physical and mental spaces con-
sist of his written responses to those images.
In 1984, Furuya accepted a job as a translator for
a Japanese construction company, and he and his
family moved to Dresden. Go ̈ssler’s severe depres-FUNKE, JAROMI ́R