After Araki
araki’s early works evoke a tender intimacy infused with a pure and painfully beautiful sense of desire.
Poetry and intimacy are everywhere in the work of Nobuyoshi Araki. Surprised by this comment? You shouldn’t be. Araki is a pho tographer of many striking paradoxes that at first seem separated by a great divide, but upon closer inspection reveal an inextricable com patibility. Whether it’s a quiet blackandwhite image of his young wife Yoko asleep on a tatami mat in the hull of a boat or a sexually explicit color image of a bound and naked woman shown in a compromised position, Araki is a photographer who always calls for attention. As a bad boy provocateur, his confron tational images often embrace sex and the spectacle of the female body framed within the complementary and op posing themes of Eros (sex and life) and Thanatos
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(death). Well knWown in the West for his erotic and by some accounts ‘pornographic’ female nude and still life images, it comes as a surprise to many that Araki’s early works evoke a tender intima cy infused with a pure and painfully beautiful sense of desire. This diversity of content is readily apparent in Araki’s photobooks, which span his prolific 50year photographic career. With titles such as Sentimental Journey to yoko, my love to in rapture and Chiro, my love, his early photobooks are loving depictions of his pri vate desires and the intimacy he shares with those closest to him. Sentimental Journey (1971), an early selfpublished book, is a tour de force love story that chronicles the early days of his marriage to Yoko
and their honeymoon. The simple white cover frames Araki and Yoko’s traditional wedding photograph. Inside are highly personal black andwhite images of Yoko: brooding as she sits on the edge of a bed, pensive in a train seat, and engaged in sex on rumpled sheets. In 1991, Araki published Sentimental Journey/Winter Journey , an