“He remains part of my identity,” she said, adding: “With a camera in front of his eye, he could see; not without.”

He died in 2012, having been in a coma for 20 years following a fall down the stairs of his favourite bar in 1992. Yoko visited him twice a month throughout his long limbo – though, heartbreakingly, he would have been unaware of her presence.

When Yoko left him in 1976, Fukase began drinking heavily and suffered bouts of debilitating depression.

For Fukase, the camera may have been a way of attempting to keep control of Yoko, as well as the world around him. “I work and photograph while hoping to stop everything,” he once said. “In that sense, my work may be some kind of revenge drama about living now.”

He photographed only Yoko for 13 years. This obsession seems to have contributed to her decision of leaving him. She would later describe their life together as moments of “suffocating dullness interspersed by violent and near suicidal flashes of excitement”.

The Japanese photographer focused obsessively on his wife and muse Yoko from the day they met till the day she left.

In 1974, photographer Masahisa Fukase set himself the rule of photographing his wife Yoko Wanibe every day from the window of their apartment in Tokyo when she left the house to go to work.

'The Woman with the Candle' (detail) by Cornelius Visscher, (1643 - 1658)

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