Nobuyoshi Araki

Nobuyoshi Araki (荒木 経惟) is Japan’s most iconic photographer and its most controversial cultural export. Araki has been described as a pornographer, a monster, a genius, a "dirty uncle" and much else besides. He makes much of his persona as a somewhat cartoonish, priapic little devil like a character in an erotic 18th-century drawing of the Floating World. Having published over 350 books, Araki is considered one of the most prolific artists alive or dead in Japan and around the world. Some of his most popular photography books are Sentimental Journey, Tokyo Lucky Hole, and Shino.
Influenced by Shunga, the erotic art of the Edo period, as well as the glossy imagery of contemporary culture, much of Araki’s work confronts taboo subjects such as sex, nudity and death head on. Subjects range from poetic scenes of old Tokyo, to sensual close-ups of exotic flowers and erotic photographs of kimono-clad women bound in rope. Araki's art is all about movement and restlessness, even though he returns again and again to the same fixations. The images abutted into a continuous tracking shot. One moves from glistening images of food to an eyeball; from a snail crawling on the lips of a woman's vagina to wilting flowers, a woman's ass to a fish's head, and then to a breast bound and squeezed with rope. The fact that some juxtapositions are alarming is part of the point.
Araki´s curiosity for this world is manifested in his insatiable need to explore the Woman. Araki is not only concerned by the specific atmosphere in the pictures of their naked bodies. It is the idea of pleasure itself; about the pure sensuality and extreme eroticism, which has nothing to do with vulgarity, neither could it be the fruit of pure voyeuristic pleasure. Work is at once shocking, mysteriously tender, deeply personal. Not all viewers digest his work smoothly, especially because of his depictions of women: women in Kimonos bound and suspended in Japanese rope bondage, women's bodies smeared with what appears to be blood, women masturbating, women with lipstick and cigarettes, women with Araki's bestiary of plastic dinosaurs and lizards. The women look at the man behind the camera, and their gaze reaches us. Often it is a look of severity, as if the spectator was really the one being objectified. What we are watching is the complicit menage-a-trois of photographer, model and camera, a kind of ritualised theatre of objectification.
His libidinous images are driven by subjectivity and desire, along with getting to the bone of bereavement, nostalgia and loneliness, their pathos being all the more affecting for being set in a body of work full to the brim with life's pleasures and excesses. In Sentimental Journey / Winter Journey Araki brings together a famous series of photographs he took recording his wedding and honeymoon, with a later series that documents his wife Yoko's illness and death in 1990. What Araki’s work mostly reflects are the sexist and regressive aspects of the reality in which we live. One must take Araki and his view of the world entire; we find ourselves at one moment in the sado-masochistic sex club Tokyo Lucky Hole, the next in the anonymous streets of the modern city. It is like being inside the camera obscura of someone's head, on whose walls everything is projected.