Murder

The genesis of Guillaume Simoneau’s new book, Murder, is in spring 1982. At around the same time Masahisa Fukase was producing his post-war masterpiece Karasu (Ravens), Simoneau’s family adopted a nest full of baby crows orphaned from a fallen tree. The photographs from this time, taken by Simoneau’s mother, paint an unusual and lyrical vision of childhood. Nearly forty years later, these moments are memorialised in dialogue with Simoneau’s new works, produced in the spring of 2016 and 2017 in Kanazawa, Japan. This setting, the birthplace of Karasu, punctuates the book with a further-reaching interest in tradition and timelessness that looks beyond the scope of these events to the landscape, famous thatched houses, the pine forests and coastline. The crisp, architectural qualities of the new photographs evoke a rendering of Fukase’s original that is, however, distinctly of its time. In Murder, the original black and white image of the photographer as a child, crows perched on his shou