quality, not quantity, does the job. and curation too. trust me you don't really need a thousand images of anything, no matter how fascinating that thing is. In October 2013, Araki lost vision in his right eye due to a retinal artery obstruction. The 74-year-old artist used the experience as an inspiration to exhibit Love on the left eye, held on 21 June 2014 at Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo. [15]

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Japan's sex industry was booming. Araki ventured into sex clubs, private orgies, and other illicit sexual events, and documented the people and scenes he encountered. The image shown here presents a scene in a club in which large holes were cut in coffin-like boxes, allowing male clients below to reach through and fondle the naked females above. It is an uncanny image, with the details of the action obscured by the angle from which it is taken and the positions of its subjects. Toiletries are visible on the right of the image, adding a quotidian dimension to the sexual activity, whilst the pose of the woman suggests boredom or endurance rather than arousal. The male figure within the box is only visible as a disembodied and phallic arm, extending towards her genitals, heightening the strangeness and impersonality of the interaction. Street Life & Home Stories.Photographs from the Goetz Collection - Sammlung Goetz". Goetz Collection. Archived from the original on 2018-03-02 . Retrieved 2018-03-02. On entering the exhibition on the museum’s second floor, the outspoken, incendiary side of Araki is in full view as one moves down a darkened hallway adorned with rope knots suggestive of kinbaku-bi (Japanese rope bondage art) to confront a lone spot-lit photograph of a suspended, bound kimono-clad woman with her legs splayed, her genitals barely covered by a flower. Conscious of their audience, the curators at the Museum of Sex are literally roping in the viewer’s attention with the most sensational work before slowly unfurling a more nuanced reading of Araki. Nobuyoshi Araki, KaoRi Love (Diptych), 2007Selvin, Claire (December 10, 2018). " 'Are You Sure Your Knowledge Is Correct?': Asian Women's Group Protests Photographer Nobuyoshi Araki in Berlin". ARTnews . Retrieved February 22, 2019. Araki has produced an extensive and extremely varied body of work (including over 500 photobooks), which has influenced subsequent photographers in nearly all genres, including street photography, documentary photography, portraiture, erotic photography, and more. According to curator Maggie Mustard, he influenced fashion photography in regard to "this aesthetic of the candid, the hip shot, the emphasis on the explicit." Arts and culture writer Alina Cohen notes that Araki's "aesthetic is instantly recognizable, whether he's capturing submissive, rope-bound women, grungy group sex in Tokyo, or eroticized flowers. [...] Over the years, Araki has become a brand." Arts editor Alice Nicolov praises his "innate technical mastery of image staging and colour." Araki's work has been legally controversial, with many of his images flaunting Japanese obscenity restrictions on the showing of pubic hair, for example. Despite public outcry, political condemnation, and police interventions, Araki refuses to modify his practice or desist from making his work. This defiance has consistently been positioned as a commentary on Japanese society and a challenge to the hypocrisy of censorship laws and other sexual repression. His practice therefore occupies a unique position where it is recognized as a vastly significant artistic export for contemporary Japan, but also a controversial and occasionally illegal body of work at odds with the establishment. In 2004, an American director, Travis Klose, released a documentary about Araki called Arakimentari, which discusses the artist's lifestyle and work.

Along that radical journey, Araki captured the transition of his country. “Photography is about a single point of a moment,” he said. “It’s like stopping time. As everything gets condensed in that forced instant. But if you keep creating these points, they form a line which reflects your life.” The radicalism that Araki depicts in his collected moments displays how the culture of Japan rapidly changed in the post-war bohemian boom spurred on by the boldly different bands washing ashore. Artists A-Z::: Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main". Museum für Moderne Kunst. Archived from the original on 2018-03-02 . Retrieved 2018-03-02. In 1981, Araki directed High School Girl Fake Diary ( 女高生偽日記, Jokōsei nise nikki ), a roman porno film, for the studio Nikkatsu. [10] The film was a disappointment to Araki's fans and to fans of the pink film genre. [11]a b c Lynne Warren (15 November 2005). Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography, 3-volume set. Routledge. pp.50–. ISBN 978-1-135-20536-2. NobuyishiAraki's point-and-shoot technique may demonstrate enthusiasm for the subject at that moment but that does not necessarily translate to the printed product. if any, they seem to become de-sexualized here (again my homo-ness could be at fault). need to ask a straight male friend to look at this. Sharp, Jasper (2008). Behind the Pink Curtain: The Complete History of Japanese Sex Cinema. Guildford: FAB Press. p.218. ISBN 978-1-903254-54-7. This subversive force was largely driven by a wave of feminism in Japan. As Setsu Shigematsu opines: “In 1970, a new women’s liberation movement emerged, marking a watershed in the history of feminism in modern Japan… Unlike liberal feminism, which stresses the achievement of equality with men, radical feminism takes a broader view, emphasising women’s oppression under patriarchy as a fundamental form of human oppression that can only be relieved through comprehensive societal and cultural transformation.” Kurt Easterwood, " Araki's latest work born of his fight with cancer", Japanexposures.com, 7 October 2009. Accessed October 24, 2010.

Araki's series Erotos (1993) poetically blends the two major driving forces behind his work, love (with Eros being the ancient Greek personification of love, desire, and passion), and death ( Thanatos being the ancient Greek personification of Death). Unsurprisingly, all of the images are highly erotic, with some, including this photograph, presenting explicit scenes of nudity and sexual congress, and others (such as close-up images of blooming or decaying flowers and overripe fruit) alluding more subtly to sex, sexual organs, and death. Extreme close-ups and careful framing to echo or present genitalia are characteristic of Araki's practice during this period, with the side-on purse of a mouth appearing at first glance to be an anus, or an extreme close-up of a vagina placed alongside a raw oyster in its shell, drawing graphic and explicit attention to their similarity in shape and texture. Photography for the Afterlife. Tokyo: Heibonsha, 2014. ISBN 978-4582278118. With an essay by Mario Perniola, "Araki's Hell". This image is one of Araki's favorite photos of Yoko, and features in both Sentimental Journey and Sentimental Journey / Winter Journey. For Araki, it is particularly resonant in the way its composition almost seemed to foretell her coming death. He explained that "In Japan we say that you cross the Sanzu River when you depart to the 'other world'. I had no intention of taking a picture like that, so I feel that maybe God or someone made me take that picture. Her posture is like that of a fetus. Also, in the area where I grew up, we rest the deceased on rush mats. She happened to be sleeping on a rush mat. All by coincidence, it was all there." Despite Araki being most frequently discussed in regard to his erotic/pornographic photo work, his Sentimental Journey is widely considered to be one of the most important Japanese photobooks. Curator Maggie Mustard calls his relationship with Yoko "the nucleus of his most iconic work."In this regard, Araki’s bold work is an empowering expose of women defying objectification. “Women? They are Gods,” he once said, and as such, he rendered them with a fine art brush even in the gaudy world of gritty urban life. This juxtaposition is a fascinating feat within his work, placing a sense of objectification and normality alongside power and Venus-like interplay. Sex clubs, cats, rope bondage, nude women, and the bliss of newlyweds on a honeymoon are some of the most famous subjects of Nobuyoshi Araki. Probably the most famous and influential Japanese photographer of the post-war period, Araki's work is technically masterful and blurs the lines between high art, photo-biography, and pornography. His photographic practice is controversial, highly sexual, and frequently challenging to both a Western and a Japanese sense of propriety and personal expression. In addition to the quality of his work, Araki also insists on the value of the quantity of images he produces, reflecting his prolific work ethic. Whilst this can make his work difficult to quantify or accurately survey, the sheer volumes of photographs, videos, photobooks, and other material he produces has its own significance, reflecting the depth and centrality of his practice to his life. He suggests that, rather than individual works, it is the spread of images extending throughout his life that is significant, echoing the repeating and never-ending qualities of a Buddhist mandala. Weisser, Thomas; Yuko Mihara Weisser (1998). Japanese Cinema Encyclopedia: The Sex Films. Miami: Vital Books: Asian Cult Cinema Publications. p.196. ISBN 1-889288-52-7.