Biography
Nobuyoshi Araki - Artist or Pornographer? from
Graeme Williams - Photographic Conversations YouTube channel
Nobuyoshi Araki was born in Tokyo on 25 May 1940, in the Minowa district, near a red-light district and at the same time near also a cemetery destined to prostitutes died without a family, a place that he later called “my child-life playground”. He entered Chiba University in 1959 to study photography and film, in a department then housed within the engineering faculty. The regimented, technical teaching did not suit his nonconformist temperament, yet his final film project, Children in Apartment Blocks (1963), planted the seed of his first important series. After graduating he joined the advertising agency Dentsu as a commercial photographer. The work felt dull to him, so he used the company’s facilities for his own projects and even borrowed its photocopier in secret to produce an early photobook. In 1964 Satchin, a series on schoolchildren from a Shitamachi neighbourhood that stayed unchanged while the city rushed toward the Olympic Games, won him the Taiyo Prize.
Two events marked the late 1960s. His father died in 1967, and in 1968 he met Yoko Aoki, an essayist then working as a typist at Dentsu. Death and love emerged as the two forces driving his work, and Yoko became his most frequent subject. They married in 1971 and Araki photographed the honeymoon at length. The resulting book, Sentimental Journey, self published in 1971, is regarded as one of the most important Japanese photobooks of the twentieth century. Its success allowed him to leave Dentsu in 1972 and devote himself entirely to art.
From 1970 he produced the Xeroxed Photo Album series, small books made on a photocopier in editions of seventy copies, which he mailed to friends, critics and people picked from the public phone book. Over the following decades the output became immense: more than 500 books, including Pseudo Reportage (1980), which pairs quasi documentary pictures with misleading captions to question the truthfulness of photography, and Tokyo Lucky Hole (1990), a record of Shinjuku’s Kabuki cho district. Parr and Badger placed four of his books in their history of the photobook. In Japan his work was partly censored for obscenity, and he was among the first to show pubic hair, even when the police intervened.
Yoko died of ovarian cancer in 1990, and the pictures of her last days appear in Winter Journey. Illness and loss kept shaping his path. In 2008 he was diagnosed with prostate cancer and recovered after surgery, and that experience fed 2THESKY, my Ender (2009), a work of photographs covered with salt that decay over time, mirroring the physical decline of the photographer. His cat Chiro died in 2010. In 2013 he lost the sight of his right eye, which inspired the 2014 exhibition Love on the left eye. His work entered the collections of Tate, SFMOMA, the Stedelijk Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago, and he received the Austrian Decoration for Science and Art in 2008 and the Mainichi Art Award in 2012. He also collaborated with Björk, Lady Gaga, Juergen Teller, Daido Moriyama and Bottega Veneta.
His figure carries a shadow as well. In 2018 Kaori, a model who posed for him from 2001 to 2016, accused him of financial and artistic exploitation, describing shoots without a contract and nude images used without her consent. Protests followed, including one at C/O Berlin, and the case brought the power dynamics between photographer and subject into public debate.
Photographic approach
Nobuyoshi Araki from
hagenworld YouTube Channel
Araki names his practice I Photography (shi shashin), after the I novel, the confessional literary genre of early twentieth century Japan. Everything in his life becomes material: the honeymoon beside dinner menus, his wife’s illness beside the changing seasons of his hometown, flowers, skies, cats, faces, streets, nudes and kinbaku bondage. He is almost never seen without a camera, and photography works for him as a way of inhabiting time and holding it before it disappears. Each frame becomes a testimony of an instant and a gesture against oblivion.
His position took shape against the dominant currents of his time. The documentary tradition of Hiroshi Hamaya and the grainy, blurred are bure boke aesthetic of the Provoke movement both looked outward, while Araki turned the camera on his own desire, family and body. He developed the idea of the photographic ego, an interplay of fiction, fact and desire, so his diaries blend real events with staged ones and captions can mislead on purpose.
Eros and thanatos form the core of the work. He often places ikebana flower arrangements beside kinbaku performances, taking conventions from Japan’s aesthetic history and charging them with erotic tension. Fading blossoms, as in Flowers and Jamorinsky, speak of transience, nostalgia and poetry. He shoots with very little preparation and a frenetic rhythm, and he experiments freely with collage, film (which he calls Arakinema), scratched positive film, salt and, later, the Polaroid, which he treated as an extension of memory and body, a form of immediate visual writing.
Personal Considerations
Arakimentari from ziqiang YouTube channel
Araki was a prolific artist whose hunger for life shaped everything he photographed, taking images of many different subjects. On this website the focus is on his artistic nudes, where he began portraying his wife and documenting married life, in a line that also runs through Emmet Gowin and Harry Callahan. Araki added another philosophical edge: the awareness that a camera can lie as well as show the truth.
He was provocative in his interviews too. In 2011 he claimed that he gained access to his models through sex. The wording is ambiguous, and since we may be reading a translation from Japanese, it could be playful exaggeration. Perhaps he enjoyed letting people imagine things that never happened. His wife described him as a gentle and sensitive man, and I find that easy to believe.
There is one controversy deserves a careful look. In 2018 Kaori, a model who posed for him from 2001 to 2016, accused him of working without a contract, irregular payment and the use of her nudes without consent. These are the most serious claims against him, and they come from one person, with no legal outcome that I know of. Other models and his wife describe a warm and gentle man who made them feel at ease. I tend to give weight to those voices. Some critics call his work pornography. I read it differently: bondage belongs to Japanese tradition, and he paired it with flowers to write a visual poetry on Eros and Thanatos.
He also welcomed imperfection. He accepted blur, grain and bodies far from any standard of perfection, searching for real and fleeting moments. He believed the beauty of imperfection. His work shows a complex life where the fact and its many interpretations run side by side to the end.
So, while we are still in time, inform yourself well and live real experiences with courage and passion.
Shine on!