Impossible in Japan: Special Blog Post

(Image borrowed from Wikipedia. Icelandic singer Björk requested Araki take this photo of her to serve as the cover for her 1997 album Telegram.)

Nobuyoshi Araki (May 25, 1940 - ) is a controversial photographer and contemporary artist from Tokyo. From 1959 to 1963 he studied photography and film making in Chiba University's engineering department, where he was the first to be awarded the Taiyo prize. After college he went to work for an advertising company called Dentsu, where he practiced photography as a hobby during his off hours. In 1971 he published his first book of photography entitled Sentimental Journey, which was an intimate chronicling of his marriage and honeymoon with Dentsu co-worker Aoki Yoko . From there, Araki's work became more intimate, as he began to capture the darker side of Tokyo, including its modern sexuality. [1]

As of today, Araki has published over 130 books of photos, and has done work for the Icelandic singer Björk, as well as the anime series Brain Powered [4]. Despite the range of his efforts, however, he is most commonly associated with his version of erotica that is "gritty, raw, unpredictable and transcendentally luminous [6]." Some of his more controversial images are those that objectify women by smearing them with paint or binding them with ropes. Many critics dismiss these images as pornography, while others see them as chaotic reflections of "ancient Edo attitudes or Tokyo's modern sexual underworld [6]."

Even though Araki wasn't taught at a western university, many view him as a western photographer in the sense that his images "operate according to rules developed within western modernist discourse [2]." Personally, I find Araki's work very evocative yet abrasive, but not in a negative way. Behind the scenes he exhibits a sort of equality between himself and his subjects by dressing as they do; he wears a suit while shooting in Ginza, and wears nothing while shooting a nude model [6]. It is because of this that I believe his motives are artistic and not sadistic, as many critics seem to feel.

Since the bulk of Araki's work is a bit too racy for this blog, I've chosen to post a couple of his urban life photographs. Even here, however, it is possible to detect perverse undertones.