Tokyo-based Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki, born in Tokyo in 1940, has gained worldwide notoriety for his frankly erotic images. Perhaps the most prolific photographer in the history of the medium, Araki is the author of more than 500 books, and his exhibitions often feature thousands of images. A self-described ‘’photo-maniac”, photography is a lifestyle for Araki; He shoots many, sometimes dozens of rolls of film a day. Best known for his voyeuristic, snapshot-like images of women often tied up with ropes (kinbaku) and colorful, sensual flowers, Araki has used photography to to interpret emotions and experiences.
Araki received a camera from his father at the age of 12. He graduated from Chiba University in 1963 with a major in photography and cinema. Soon after graduation, he began working in commercial photography, joining the advertising agency Dentsu in 1963. During his nine years there, he also pursued his own projects. In 1964, he won the Taiyo Prize for Satchin (1963), a black-and-white series of photographs of inner-city children, the title of which is derived from a little girl’s nickname. He showed these and other works in his first exhibition in 1965.
In 1970, Araki created the first of his Xerox photo albums, which he produced in limited editions and sent to friends, art critics, and people randomly selected from the phone book. The quality of this early form of photocopying often resulted in unusual tonal effects in the resulting images. In 1971, he published a privately printed collection of photographs, Senchimentaru na tabi (Sentimental Journey), which depicted his personal life, particularly his wedding and honeymoon with Yoko Aoki, in diary form. At first glance, the images appear to be naive records, but they are actually staged. Sentimental Journey established Araki’s reputation, and in 1972 he left Dentsu to become a freelance photographer. Since then, almost all of his work has revolved around his own life, and almost always the women close to him.
Stylistically, Araki has never been a purist. He works in black and white and color, using cibachrome and color photocopies for their garishness and artificiality; he uses natural light and hard flash. Araki has also employed many experimental techniques and processes, including collage, montage, solarization, and hand-applied color, including paint. He also works with damaged or decaying negatives and scratches into the emulsion of finished prints, as in a series in which he scratched out the genitals of nudes. He juxtaposes snapshots with studio photographs, portraits with street scenes, and still life with hardcore pornography. He photographs voraciously, from the female body to food to cats. Working primarily with a Pentax 6×7 format camera, Araki dates the resulting prints to register them in time; in his ongoing Tokyo Diaries, Araki uses a camera that automatically prints the date on the image. Reflecting the nature of his shooting, his work is presented and best understood in the context of the series.
Araki’s work is paradoxical in that it is subjective yet makes no claim to photographic truth; he often appears in scenes of sexual activity, yet one of his best-known images is a self-portrait in which he wears his recently deceased wife’s pink coat and clutches a large black-and-white framed portrait of her. For Araki, an everyday street scene can be transformed into a site of intimate revelation. Particularly preoccupied with female sexuality, Araki attempts to become more intimate with women through photography, claiming that the ropes he uses mimic an embrace. Critics, however, argue that the photographer’s objectification of his subject limits, if not precludes, emotional connection and thus empathy, creating images that are, in effect, devoid of intimacy. Araki’s work seeks to balance the sublime and the obscene; it is at once shocking and mysteriously tender. Over the years, his bold, unabashed photographs have been subject to censorship, especially in his native Japan, but this has not diminished his influence. Series have included images of gagged and bound women, dressed in the traditional kimono, on tatami mats in a riyokan (Japanese inn). Although the women are often restrained and silenced, the Japanese art of rope tying, kinbaku, differs from Western bondage. Araki’s images are also heirs to the Japanese tradition of erotic art, especially shunga, the erotic painting of the Edo period. They combine ecstasy and death, a passion for life and a melancholy awareness of life’s finiteness.
Flowers have appeared in several of Araki’s projects in the 1990s and are appropriate subjects for his fusion of Eros and death. Araki’s photographs make clear that flowers are reproductive organs and emblems of the consummation of love. Yet Araki’s floral studies are hardly sentimental; the petals are often painted in garish colors and seem past their prime.
The city of Tokyo is another of Araki’s chosen subjects, although he claims to be interested only in the urban areas he frequents and knows well, such as Shinjuku, Tokyo’s entertainment district, with its nightclubs, strip joints, and seedy hotels. The people in Araki’s Tokyo often seem sad and lonely. He claims that ”photography is synonymous with what relates to me. I don’t go somewhere just to take pictures.”
Araki has edited most of his own books and has gained a strong and growing following in the United States and Europe. He has formed friendships with other great photo diarists such as Robert Frank and Nan Goldin, and in 1995 Araki published a book with Goldin (Tokyo Love). He has also explored stylized fashion photography. In 2002, the German publisher Taschen published a lavish tribute to Araki’s work – an enormous and unique (numbered and signed) book of 1,000 images, with a print run of only 2,500 copies. In 2003, the photographer published Araki by Araki: The Photographer’s Personal Selection 1963-2002 – the most comprehensive collection of his work, with images from every year.
Araki received the annual award of the Photographic Society of Japan in 1990, followed by the domestic photography award at the Higashikawa International Photo Festival in 1991, and the Mainichi Art Award in 2012. His work has been widely exhibited internationally, including major retrospectives at the Museum of Sex, New York, and the Musée Guimet, Paris. His work is included in the permanent collections of international institutions such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and the Tate Modern, London.
