Nobuyoshi Araki “Photo-Mad Old Man A 76th Birthday”, installation view at Taka Ishii Gallery Photography / Film, May 25 – Jun 29, 2016 Photo: Kenji Takahashi
“Art is all about doing what you shouldn’t,” Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki observed. Always willing to push the edge of existence to the boundaries of the sensory world, Araki wields a camera like a sword, finely slicing live into fragments of experience. His work synthesizes the dialectic of opposites, discovering the space where beauty and brutality become one.
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Born in Tokyo on May 25, 1940, Araki has become one of the foremost photographers of our time, revered for his singular style of visual poetry made of light, color, and form. Forever seeing the world through fresh eyes, Araki’s work continues to describe the space between death and life. As he reveals, “Photography is about a single point of a moment. 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.”
Nobuyoshi Araki “Photo-Mad Old Man A 76th Birthday”, 2016, RP-Pro Crystal print, image size: 32.3 x 40.4 cm, paper size: 35.6 x 43.2 cm © Nobuyoshi Araki / Courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery Photography / Film.
It is by virtue of being fully present that we can understand the past, of how it has come to this, to the here and now. To call Araki prolific would be an understatement. Having published over 350 books by 2005, and even more in the past decade, Araki’s commitment to creating art is as singular as his subject matter. His love for the erotic aspects of the feminine defines much of his life’s work. It is intense, intimate, and obsessive, yet romantic and seductive at the same time.
A new exhibition of Araki’s work is currently on view in Photo-Mad Old Man A 76th Birthday at Taka Ishii Gallery Photography / Film, Tokyo, through June 29, 2016. This exhibition, the artist’s 23rd with the gallery, features nine color works from the “Photo-Mad Old Man A 76th Birthday” series and 471 black and white works from his latest series “Tombeau Tokyo.”
Nobuyoshi Araki “Photo-Mad Old Man A 76th Birthday”, installation view at Taka Ishii Gallery Photography / Film, May 25 – Jun 29, 2016 Photo: Kenji Takahashi
For the “Photo-Mad Old Man A 76th Birthday” series, Araki collaborated with dancer KaoRi beginning in 2002, photographing her annually on her birthday, creating a lyrical collection of work. He shot the images using 6 x 7 positive film to commemorate the 76th year of his life. As Araki has revealed, “If you want to change your photographs, you need to change cameras. Changing cameras means that your photographs will change. A really good camera has something I suppose you might describe as its own distinctive aura.”
The color series is rich and dense, the depths of the photographs exploring the space where Eros and Thanatos connect. These works are beautifully counterbalanced by a black and white series of work, “Tombeau Tokyo,” which Araki shot for his solo exhibition at the Musée Guimet, Paris, in April this year. While photographing Aoyama Cemetery from inside a car, Araki observed that the high-rise buildings of the Tokyo skyline in the distance began to look like giant grave markers, rendering the entire city a graveyard.
Nobuyoshi Araki “Photo-Mad Old Man A 76th Birthday”, 2016, RP-Pro Crystal print, image size: 32.3 x 40.4 cm, paper size: 35.6 x 43.2 cm © Nobuyoshi Araki / Courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery Photography / Film.
Araki sees life and death as two sides of the same coin, the connection unbroken and the relationship an on-going experience. As he revealed, “Photography has always been associated with death. Reality is colorful, yet early photography always took the color out of reality and made it black-and-white. Color is life; black-and-white is death. There was a ghost hidden in the invention of photography.”
Miss Rosen is a New York-based writer, curator, and brand strategist. There is nothing she adores so much as photography and books. A small part of her wishes she had a proper library, like in the game of Clue. Then she could blaze and write soliloquies to her in and out of print loves.
