Art in Japan>Contemporary Art 1930-2004>Araki by Araki

Original articles on art, artists, architecture, exhibitions, galleries, museums and cultural institutions around Tokyo, Japan.

Araki by Araki

by John McGee

Photographer Nobuyoshi Araki (b. 1940) is so prolific he makes Picasso look like a slacker. If, as is often reported, he really shoots up to 40 rolls a day, that means he's taken hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of photos of bondaged bijin (beautiful women) and explicit orchids over his 40-year career. These appear in an endless onslaught of exhibitions and in roughly 300 photo books produced to date. How do you navigate such an oeuvre? With a personal tour. 

Nobuyoshi Araki, Middle-aged Woman,
1964 (Images courtesy the artist and
Taka Ishii Gallery)

"Araki by Araki" is a new book and exhibition of the pudgy, spiky-haired photographer's greatest hits. For the Kodansha title, Araki selected 2,000 of his favorite photos taken since 1963. The book's designer and frequent Araki collaborator, Toshine Ishihama, cropped those to 420 for this museum-like mini-retrospective at Taka Ishii Gallery. Stretching vertically up and down the walls and divided into the year they were made, the photos reveal a surprising range within and beyond Araki's trademark women and flowers. 

While developing his style in the 1960s, Araki seemed to channel multiple photographers. Shitamachi (old town) street urchins picking their noses and mugging for the camera (1963) recall Helen Levitt. Portraits of apple-doll obasans (elderly women) in Ginza (1964) have the weirdness of Diane Arbus. And pensive women sitting in the subway (1966) are like latter-day Walker Evans. That's not to say Araki is derivative but that he likes to experiment. 

Installation view of "Araki by Araki,"
Taka Ishii Gallery 

This attitude carries over to technique. Araki slips freely between color and black-and-white, from 35mm to medium format to Polaroid. And, in the same way that many of his models are trussed up like Thanksgiving turkeys, he's subjected his negatives and prints to a kind of delicious torture. He has solarized and photocopied them, bleeding the grays into pixelated black-and-white outlines of shoppers in the street. He has left negatives out in the rain, curdling and cracking their nudes. Some of the earliest pieces here have been literally torn out of scrapbooks the photographer once kept, their rotten edges bitten off in the process. 

One of Araki's talents is skirting between art, documentary and porn (all the while evading censors). Perhaps he can do this because he lives through his camera—his photos trace the ups and downs of his career and personal life. He remembers his nine years at advertising giant Dentsu in an odd 1964 shot of two small Mitsubishi refrigerators, one with a door open to show exotic ketchup and frozen vegetables. He pays homage to his father, a sculptor, in an enigmatic 1965 photo of kids wearing crude masks and standing in the back of a truck parked in a field. And tender photos from the "Sentimental Journey" series capture Araki's love for his wife Yoko while she was alive, and his pain in watching her die of cancer in 1990. 

Nobuyoshi Araki, Lust Flower, 2001 

At 62, Araki still manages to pursue his photographic desires with a talent and energy best described as virile. The coda to the exhibition is a set of Polaroids of his very cute, very young and very nude current lover smiling in a bubble bath and kicking her legs over her head in a love hotel. At the end of the party following the exhibition opening, Araki stood up, thanked everyone, and, with the same girlfriend in tow, gave his standard farewell, "Excuse us, we are going to go have sex now."

This exhibition was held May-June 2003 at Taka Ishii Gallery in Shinkawa, Tokyo, Japan.

©2006 John McGee

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