Japanese
Tokyo-based Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki has gained worldwide notoriety for his candidly erotic pictures. Perhaps the most prolific photographer in the history of the medium, Araki is the author of more than 200 books, and his exhibitions often include thousands of images. A self-styled ''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-style images of women often tied up with ropes (kinbaku) and colorful, sensual flowers, Araki has used photography to interpret emotions and experience.
Born in Tokyo, Araki was given a camera at the age of 12 by his father. In 1963, he graduated from the engineering department at Chiba University, majoring in photography and cinema. He went into commercial photography soon after graduating, working at the advertising company Dentsu in 1963. During his nine years there, he also pursued his own projects. In 1964 he received the Taiyo prize for Satchin (1963), a black and white photographic series featuring kids from downtown Tokyo, whose title derives from the pet name of a little girl. He exhibited these works and others in his first exhibition in 1965.
In 1970 Araki created the first of his Xerox photo albums, which he produced in a limited edition and sent to friends, art critics, and people randomly selected from the phone book. The quality of this early type of photocopy often led to unusual tonal effects in the resulting images. In 1971, he published the privately printed photographic collection Sentimental Journey (Senchimentaru na tabi), in which his personal life, in particular his wedding and honeymoon with Yoko Aoki, was displayed in a diary format. At first glance the images seem to be naive records but they are in fact staged. Sentimental Journey established Araki's reputation, and in 1972 he left Dentsu and became a freelance photographer. Since then, almost all his works have revolved around his own life, and are almost always about the women who are close to him.
Stylistically, Araki has never been a purist. He works in black and white and color, using ciba-chrome as well as color photocopies for their gar-ishness 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 (one series presents paint dripped onto close-up images of vaginas). He also works with negatives that are damaged or decayed, and scratches into the emulsion on finished prints, such as in a series where he scratched out the genitals on nudes. He juxtaposes snapshots with studio photos, portraits, and street scenes, and still lifes with hardcore pornography. He photographs voraciously, from the female body to food to cats. Araki works primarily with a Pentax 6 x 7 format camera, dating 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 how he shoots, his work is presented and is best understood in the context of the series.
Araki's work is paradoxical in that it is subjective and yet makes no claim to photographic truth; he often appears in scenes containing sexual activity, yet one of his best known images is a self-portrait wearing his recently deceased wife's pink coat, gripping a large black-and-white framed portrait of her. For Araki, an everyday street scene may become transformed into a setting of intimate revelation. Particularly preoccupied with female sexuality, Araki attempts to become more intimate with women through photography, claiming the ropes he uses replicate an embrace. However critics argue that the photographer's objectification of his subject limits if not precludes emotional connection and hence empathy, creating in effect, images void of intimacy. Similarly to Goldin and Joel-Peter Witkin, who also work with erotic imagery, 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 the object of censorship, especially in his native Japan, a fact that has not diminished his influence. Series have included images of gagged and tied women wearing the traditional dress of the 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 style bondage. Araki's images are also heir to the Japanese tradition of erotic art, especially Shunga, the erotic painting from the Edo period. They combine ecstasy and death, a passion for life and a melancholy awareness of the finite-ness of life.
Flowers have featured in several of Araki's projects of the 1990s and are appropriate subjects for his fusion of eros and death. Araki's photographs make explicit that flowers are reproductive organs and emblems of the consummation of love. However, Araki's flower studies are hardly sentimental; the flowers petals are often painted with garish colors and seem past their prime.
The city of Tokyo is another of Araki's chosen subjects although he claims only an interest in the urban areas he frequents and knows well, such as Shinjuku, Tokyo's entertainment district with its nightclubs, strip joints, and seedy hotels. People often seem sad and lonely in Araki's Tokyo. He claims that ''photography is synonymous with what relates to me. I don't go somewhere simply to take photographs.''
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 delved into stylized fashion photography. In 2002, the German publisher Taschen released a lavish tribute to Araki's work—an enormous and unique (numbered and signed) book featuring 1000 images, with a print run of only 2500 copies. In 2003 the photographer published Araki by Araki: The Photographer's Personal Selection 1963-2002—the most comprehensive collection of his work, gathering images from each year.
Daniel Palmer
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