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| I asked about the possibility of making a snuff film. I was told it would cost about £4,300... | |
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Tsurisaki has published six books, two of which, Revelations (a 12-year anthology of his corpse shots) and Requiem De La Rue Morgue have been released in France. He also directed a film, Orozco El Embalsamador, which looks at the life of a Colombian embalmer. Intensely explicit, his work is not for the squeamish. But while there is an voyeuristic element of shock and gore value, the photos are strangely compelling – portrait-like, still life, or journalistic reportage, each corpse bearing testimony to a tragedy.
Originally an S&M porn director – Tsurisaki says his films were “set in the Pacific war, where the Japanese Gestapo torture Japanese high-school-girl spies” – he started shooting corpses in 1994 when the director of the S&M video company had the idea of setting up a magazine with a feature that included shots of dead people.
“Before that, I had no experience as a working photographer, and apparently he asked a number of people if they would shoot a dead body, but no-one agreed,” Tsurisaki tells Bizarre. “At the time, I was newly unemployed, so I thought it would be OK to go overseas and shoot a dead body – why not? So I went to Thailand, was able to get the shots, it was fun, so I continued.”
Did he ever. Tsurisaki has shot in places such as Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, and Russia, and the deceased are victims of murder, suicide, car crashes and the like. His pictures are taken with graphic candour, and he holds back nothing in terms of intimacy and the sensation of being there. Many of the horrendously mutilated bodies are obviously photographed straight after the death – which poses the question, how did he get access to these scenes?
“In Thailand, the journalists from the local crime magazines would listen to the radio signals of the rescue teams and the police. So in the beginning I hung out with those journalists. Eventually, I got a lift from the rescue teams to the scene. It’s a country that has a culture of photographing dead people, in a way. They have a different, non-Westernised perspective on death.”
However, each country comes with its own difficulties, and Tsurisaki would gamble based on intuition. In many instances, he didn’t even know how he would go about getting the shots until he got there.
“Colombia and Mexico have these cultures where you can see many corpses in the papers, so given that background, taking these photos is OK. For Russia, there was a TV programme that would show crimescenes, and I followed their crew. That was in 1996, but that programme finished and I don’t think it’s possible to take these kinds of photographs any more.”
Tsurisaki’s career has seen him held at gunpoint, nearly kidnapped by militant guerrillas, and caught in the crossfire in Palestine, but the country with the most impact for him was Colombia, where he shot his film Orozco in 1999.
“It’s my favourite place in the world, being one of the most unstable,” he says. And he has a thousand other stories. “There was a Japanese S&M film producer who wanted to make a snuff film. I offered to ask around about it, and got told you can make one for a million yen (about £4,300). It’s cheap, but eventually they couldn’t get the funds together. And then, even if they did it, I mean, they can’t publicly announce it!”
Tsurisaki considers himself a shockumentary- and Italian-film-loving “relatively normal” guy, and feels no overt psychological repercussions from the nature of his work. So what are the difficulties of the job?
“The scene is never like how you want it, it never goes to plan, and it’s not like you can just pick up a dead body and move it. But then you can say it’s a limiting situation, so it’s interesting. Also, there aren’t that many places globally that will allow me to take photos of this nature.”
He is called upon by the Japanese media as an authority on the effect of hardcore photos on people’s psyches after murders or incidents like the Aum Shinrikyo cult’s gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995. However, he says he’s had little resistance to his work, and, seeing as he is able to even exist as an artist, you could say Japan is relatively forgiving of his career. Moreover, he has a bevy of young, female fans, and there are various speciality museums that display his art.
But conversely, Tsurisaki tells us this isn’t quite how he wants people to react. “Sometimes I feel bitter that I haven’t influenced society in a major way – like, say you go to someone’s house and they are growing pot. They will almost always have a copy of Burst High [Japan’s marijuana magazine].
“If someone commits a really deranged murder, I mean they should have my photos, right? No. In reality, the people who do commit murders, they have bad taste. You hear of them getting influenced by these cheap, crappy, sadistic films, but they haven’t heard of me. They simply have bad taste.”
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