Ah, wanted to open a thread about it for quite a some time. Now i don't remember where i encountered Araki's work first - it could be some music album cover or that documentary piece by Sion Sono or whoever else where he featured.
Araki is photographer, he was taking photos for the whole life (he is old guy now), and many of hist photos are erotica, sometimes borderlines porn. Also very often it's candid, capturing just the crazy life around. He is interesting man, i think he is just like many of those japanese guys who grew up after World War II, have some sort of darkness buried inside body and soul. Like manga artist Suehiro Maruo, and many others. But, i know jack shit, whatever.
What i know, he also surely has charisma, for sure. As much "offending" his photos are for "journalists" and else, women love his works (some still cant tell if he was joking or not that he had sex with everyone lol). Bjork and others often cited him as inspiration and influence. What amusing, though, he hates "artists" and couldnt care less about all related shit. So well, he is not pretentious and just documents weird ass life around him. Though some of stuff he made is awkward... Funnily you can draw similarities to someone like, for example, Merzbow (Masami Akita, noise "musician").
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/t/tap/797757 ... w=fulltext
HY: I am most interested in how you gained intimate access to your subjects. How did you develop your method?
NA: Don’t ask me such a thing! I gained access through sex. Sex is like foreplay. Photography comes afterwards. Or vice versa.
HY: Do you have sex with all your models?
NA: Of course I had sex with all my models. It is a certainty. But now I can’t do it any more. I am so sorry.
HY: Several of your books, such as Sentimental Journey (1971) and Yoko My Love (1978), document your deceased wife’s private life with you. Sentimental Journey brought you a lot of attention for its honest depiction of everyday life, like pictures in a family album. These pictures, including shots of Yoko having sex with you, are quite revealing. What made you decide to publish such personal images? Did you consider their shock value? Was this a way to gain an attention to your career? How did your wife, Yoko, feel about being physically and emotionally exposed to that degree? Would you say she was your collaborator?
NA: I did not intend to shock anyone. I had more of a “natural impulse.” Only artists without talent try to shock people. Because showing naked (genitals) was prohibited (in Japan), it was sensational to show them, but I was not thinking in such a calculated way. As to my honeymoon, I started taking photographs right away, beginning with our train ride, and then having sex. That is what everyone does on a honeymoon, so it is nothing special.
At the time the book was published, people were more concerned about sex. Now people care less.
When Sentimental Journey was published, Yoko brought this book to the office where she worked. The great thing about Yoko is, she tried to sell it to her co-workers, even to her boss.
I have luck with women. I am not a great photographer, but I only have great subjects such as Yoko and Kaori.
NA: I don’t think about it. I do not care about my male viewers’ responses at all. My friends have complained, for a long time, that they cannot masturbate to my photos. That is because they do not have a sense of how to look at photography. When photographers in general make ordinary pornography, they do not touch the models. Male viewers in general seek “beautiful” images in pornography. Meaning, they do not want to look at reality in women’s body such as wrinkles and “love handles”.. That’s why other male viewers can’t masturbate to my work. But I think the dirtiness of sex would in fact attract people. Beautiful “normal” pornography does not appeal to the human heart.
HY: In earlier interviews, you stated that you were influenced by Japanese culture rather than by well-known photographers in the West. What is your relationship with Japanese culture? More specifically, what is your relationship with the city of Tokyo?
NA: Tokyo is my neighborhood in both a physical and a mental sense. I often take pictures of the sky, but the sky is not the sky if it is not taken from my own balcony. Sky can be interesting only in juxtaposition to the electric poles and wires that are running through Tokyo. Images of the sky alone are not very interesting. ‘Sky’ is other world; life after death. ‘City’ (Tokyo) is this world. My photos must contain both of them in the same frame. “Sky is like a film!” Sounds sophisticated, doesn’t it?
http://purple.fr/diary/an-exclusive-int ... shi-araki/
http://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/arts-ente ... i-reflectsABRAHAM CRUZVILLEGAS — Many artists talk about ideas, concepts, history, and transcendence, but I love that you speak about emotion.
NOBUYOSHI ARAKI — It’s misguided to talk about arty stuff. You have to be a bit naughty in life and make mistakes. You wouldn’t be able to capture it properly otherwise. In art, people tend to put importance on doing something a little different to express themselves
"I believe that all women want to be tied up, and not only physically but mentally as well," he says. "If a man does not tie a beautiful women up, she will run away. You have to tie her up so she can't."
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/yvng ... -118-v15n7He snorts at the suggestion that he is an artist as much as a photographer. "Modern art is a con," he says forcefully. "It betrays you. Contemporary art is a fraud and I'm a photographer, not an artist. There are too many lies in contemporary art. I'm a liar in my work, but contemporary artists tell more lies."
Asked how he is a liar, Araki says the images that are captured by a camera are merely a copy of reality. They are not real; they are, by definition, a lie.
http://artradarjournal.com/2016/08/17/e ... met-paris/You don’t necessarily just want to shoot beautiful people then.
No. I don’t discriminate in terms of my subjects. You have to always be able to accept and embrace them. They’re all amazing, but each person has that extra-special unique something in them. Usually photographers have their preferences, and some might really want to shoot a particular actress or something, but I don’t have that. Anything and anybody who I have the privilege of encountering is significant in themselves. Some people may seem like assholes, but you have to be accepting enough to think that maybe you’re projecting a preconceived idea onto them, and they’re not really assholes. That way, you might be able to discover something nice about them. Now, it’s easy to say that, but I must admit, there sure are a lot of bitches out there! [laughs]
Photography was destined to be involved with death. Reality is in color, but at its beginnings photography always discolored reality and turned it into black and white. Color is life, black and white is death. A ghost was hiding in the invention of photography.
http://www.dazeddigital.com/photography ... oshi-arakiTokyo is a cemetery. It’s a park of attraction. In fact, I don’t separate paradise and hell. For me, if paradise doesn’t include elements of hell, it’s not paradise. For example, a woman that is exempt from all evil doesn’t attract me. You know, the king of hell, Enma in Japanese mythology, exists even in paradise. It is difficult for me therefore to express this nuance. I try to capture this idea in a photograph. It’s a current of thought to which I adhere since a long time. It’s the same as with flowers, I photograph those that are about to wither, without being conscious.
Araki’s nudes range from tender, loving images of his wife naked to graphic, almost obscene pictures of women trussed with rope and being penetrated by vibrators. Nudity, however, does not simply mean nakedness for the artist, who says he doesn’t see nudity as an exposed breast or pubis but rather believes that a woman is exposed through her face, not by her naked body.
Eh, i can't find what i was searching, somewhere it was mentioned how when he was a boy, there was basically a cemetry of nude sluts near his house... Post-ww2 shit times, yep.In the foreword for the Taschen publication Araki he explains why he almost exclusively photographs women – “A photographer who doesn’t take photos of women is no photographer, or only a third-rate one. Women teach you much more about the world than reading Balzac’s Human Comedy”.
Ah wait, that was from documentary
Full version of it worth a watch, if u find it
^ damn he is funny when he talks to models, dat laugh
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Internet ain't that good source for his photos, also considering he has 300+ books released, so i honestly cant know which were the best ones, and which were trash. I cant also comment on bondage and other shit he often made, so i'd say his most interesting captures are often non-erotic ones, though underground life of tokyo is curious cycle. And as i said, regardless of how u say about photos, Araki has some cool things spoken if u find full english version of Arakimentari doc.
In any way, those cycles like his diary cycles, fucked up or not, but they were pretty much honest reflection of what happened around. Surely more honest than most of stuff that people post in instagram now, lol.
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Some random pictures for now:
