Nobuyoshi Araki

Path into Photography

Araki encountered cameras early through his father, an amateur photographer, and in 1959 entered the Department of Photographic Printing Engineering in the Faculty of Engineering at Chiba University.^*12 He later recalled watching Italian films avidly as a student, so technical training in photography developed alongside a cinematic sense of figures and time.^*13 His graduation project, Satchin, photographed children in Tokyo's old downtown neighborhoods and received the first Taiyo Prize in 1964. As the city was being rapidly rebuilt during the high-growth years leading to the Tokyo Olympics, Araki followed the distances, gestures, and play of children around Minowa, establishing an early point of departure for his work outside advertising.^*17

Araki's father died in 1967, and the following year he met Yoko Aoki at Dentsu. SFMOMA's research materials identify these two events as important beginnings for the themes of “death” and “love” that would later run through his work.^*17 From this point, photographs of people encountered in the street, such as those in Satchin, were increasingly joined by the lived time of family, a lover, and the photographer himself. Sentimental Journey (1971) made that shift visible in the form of a photobook.

Advertising, Xerox, and Self-Publishing

Araki joined Dentsu in 1963 and worked professionally with advertising photography, printing, and reproduction. He also repurposed company equipment for personal work, using a photocopier to make the Xerox Photo Albums and distributing them to acquaintances.^*27 In the same workplace he experienced two different production systems: advertising made to serve a product or campaign, and self-published books in which he chose the subject, sequence, and recipients himself. That practical contrast became part of the foundation for his later work.

In Japan during the 1960s and 1970s, the photobook became a major expressive medium alongside the photographic print, and page order, printing, paper, and edition size increasingly shaped how a body of work was seen.^*15 Araki used this publishing environment to make his own booklets and circulate them by hand or mail without waiting for institutional recognition. The experience of shortening the distance between shooting and publication later carried into his photographic diaries and magazine serials.

Sentimental Journey

Sentimental Journey (1971) photographed Araki and Yoko's honeymoon in Kyoto and Kyushu and was issued privately in an edition of 1,000 copies.^*27 Lodging, travel, meals, sleep, and sex appear as the time of a couple's life, with tourist description pushed to the margins. In his preface, Araki criticized contemporary magazine photography for presenting faces, nudity, private life, and landscapes as fabricated images, and described his own photography through an analogy to the Japanese I-novel.^*19 The photographer and subject were sharing a life, and the book appeared while that relationship was still unfolding. These conditions gave Araki's first person a concrete form.

MoMA holds individual 1971 prints originating in Sentimental Journey.^*3 In the 1971 book, scenes of lodging, a boat, meals, sleep, and sex continue across the pages, editing Araki's relationship with Yoko as a temporal sequence.^*19 The relationship unfolds through repeated scenes, and readers move through the order in which the couple spent time together. That sequential experience is one reason the photobook became essential to the work.

At the same moment, PROVOKE destabilized images of the city through coarse grain, camera shake, and lost focus. Araki began from his own married life. He also acknowledged the strong stimulus he received from PROVOKE.^*14 While Japanese photography was intensely reexamining documentation and language, the city and politics, Araki made the relationship between the person taking the picture and the person being photographed a central part of the work. That approach helped define the direction his later I-photography would take.

Tokyo After Leaving Dentsu

After leaving Dentsu in 1972, Araki concentrated on photographing Tokyo by walking the city again. Satoshi Hachikaku traces roughly two years of work from Tokyo wa, Aki through Shūsengo and Watashi Tōkyō, a period in which Araki himself described returning to Tokyo in order to “start photography over”.^*30 Alongside intimate life with his wife, the body that walked, collided with, and stopped within the city also entered his first-person photography.

During this period Araki also expressed a strong unease with the way the reality of the street became fixed as a single “landscape” the moment the film was developed.^*30 His attention to the gap between a body living inside reality and the image that exists after photography carried into his later pseudo-diaries and large-scale re-editing. Araki's I-photography expanded through repeated movement among the present of walking Tokyo, the past preserved in photographs, and the author's image at the moment of publication. Tokyo wa, Aki, which records conversations between Araki and Yoko, is also a primary source for the sensibility of this period after he left Dentsu and began walking Tokyo anew.^*21

Time and Editing in I-Photography

In the “I-photography” that Araki compared to the Japanese I-novel, life at the moment of shooting is reconstructed into the published “I” through selection, dates, titles, and page order. A photograph retains the position and time from which the camera was raised; a photobook adds another temporal layer through later selection. Anne Taylor compares Sentimental Journey / Winter Journey with the I-novel tradition and examines how the photobook constructs its author's “I”.^*23 Araki's first person therefore contains both emotions lived at the time and the authorial image produced by selecting that life afterward.

In Pseudo-Diary (1980) and the photographic diaries of the 1980s, actual dates, dates added later, and staged scenes intermingle, making the boundary between fact and fabrication part of the work itself. Kotaro Iizawa describes Araki during this period as increasingly mixing actual events with constructed fictions while drawing what he saw into first-person photography.^*27 The “I” becomes an authorial position from which the present is narrated through shooting and editing; it does not mechanically guarantee factual truth.

David Campany discusses Araki as one of the photographers through whom the boundary between the snapshot and the staged photograph can be reconsidered.^*16 Fact and staging coexist within Araki's first person, and he actively uses photography's ability to hold both a fragment of the actual world and a scene constructed by the author in the same image.

Life with Yoko

Yoko was a central subject after Sentimental Journey and also a partner in daily life who wrote about that life herself. Her book Aijō Seikatsu includes an essay on “the relationship of photographing and being photographed,” preserving the perspective of the person on the other side of the camera within the marriage.^*20 Araki's photographs and Yoko's writing record, from different positions, how the act of photographing took place within their shared life and within the formation of each person's image of the other.

Araki retained final control over the selection of photographs, titles, publication, and later reuse. Images produced within a shared life circulated as works by “Nobuyoshi Araki,” so intimacy and editorial authority occupied the same structure. Sentimental Journey / Winter Journey (1991) combined twenty-one photographs from the 1971 honeymoon with ninety-one date-stamped images following Yoko from illness through the period after her death, connecting marriage and bereavement across two decades.^*1 The edit folds death into the longer time of a married life that had already been photographed for years.

Shashin Jidai and the Speed of Publication

Founded in 1981, Shashin Jidai greatly accelerated Araki's publishing activity. In every issue he ran three serials—Keshiki, Shōjo Friend, and Shashin Seikatsu—publishing photographs and text within a magazine whose first issue circulated 140,000 copies and which became monthly in 1984.^*28 A privately published book went directly to a limited circle; Shashin Jidai sent Tokyo streets, women, sex, friendships, and daily events to a large readership at short intervals.

The pages of Shashin Jidai themselves supported this method. Miyako Ishiuchi later recalled how photographs with very different subjects and forms occupied the same magazine—for example, Araki's nudes alongside Daido Moriyama's introspective black-and-white work.^*31 Because the publication sat ambiguously between an erotic magazine and a photography magazine, Araki could send domestic life, the street, women, diary entries, and writing to readers at the same pace instead of separating them into different outlets.

Araki's “more, more” attitude in SFMOMA's video material also fits this serial environment.^*4 He increased the amount he photographed and moved images rapidly into magazines and photobooks, allowing photography to keep pace with changes in daily life.

This speed gave Araki's method a particular meaning. A retrospective publication made after a life has been completed creates a long interval between experience and release. Araki used serial publication to photograph the life he was living, write about it, and send it to the next issue. He then returned to photography while carrying the newly published public persona of “Arākī.” Tokyo Diary gathers the daily record that ran from the first issue of Shashin Jidai through the final issue of its successor Shashin Seikatsu, showing how the time of photographing, writing, and magazine publication remained linked over many years.^*29

Tokyo, Sex, and the Viewer

Alongside domestic life, Araki photographed Tokyo's alleys, sex industry, bondage, and nudity in enormous quantities. In his work with editor Akira Suei, daily life, eroticism, literature, and art shared the same pages, with serials running from Gekisha and Nise Ruporutāju after 1976 into Shashin Jidai.^*28 By publishing the home and the sex industry, documentation and staging, as parts of the same urban life under his own name, Araki greatly expanded the range of what his I-photography could contain.

In the bondage and nude photographs, the viewer's position matters as much as the model's body. Hiroko Hagiwara analyzes Araki's sexual imagery through the way the viewer's gaze is gendered.^*22 The photographer's desire, his relationship with the model, the market for magazines and photobooks, and the viewer's position overlap. Together they make visible a central problem in I-photography: how far another person can be absorbed into the author's own story.

Re-Editing the Photobook

Araki has published more than five hundred photobooks, repeatedly reusing the same negatives, people, and city under different titles and in different sequences.^*17 The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum titled its 2017 retrospective Sentimental Journey 1971–2017– in order to treat the work from the 1971 book through Yoko's death, the sky, flowers, his cat, and diaries as one long journey.^*1 Each photobook functions as a new point of entry from which earlier life can be edited again at a later moment.

Official profiles and recent retrospective materials likewise describe Araki's publications as numbering more than five hundred.^*5 That scale reflects decades of re-editing older photographs from new stages of life as much as it reflects the recurrence of familiar subjects.

His use of 35mm black-and-white, color, Polaroid, medium format, and compact cameras with date imprinting also relates to this publishing speed. A date-imprinting camera fixes a day within the image, Polaroid produces an image immediately after exposure, and a magazine serial can move photographs into public circulation on a short cycle. Araki chose media that allowed shooting, editing, and publication to turn at the pace of life, even when the resulting photographs had very different visual textures.

Pseudo-Diary and Staging

Staging also enters Araki's first person. Pseudo-Diary unsettles the reliability of dates and events, while Nise Ruporutāju mixes the outward form of reportage with constructed scenes.^*27 The factual event recorded by the camera and the story imposed by the author can no longer be received as identical. Araki's I-photography includes this joining of actuality and fiction alongside the evidentiary force of photographs of private events.

Studio bondage, street snapshots, and meals with his wife continue under the same authorial name despite radically different shooting conditions. Araki's desire, friendships, work, and everyday territory enter every one of these situations. What holds the body of work together is his repeated act of turning his own position in relation to the world into photographs, across many techniques and subjects.

Manipulating the date makes Araki's conception of time particularly concrete. Editorial recollections of Shashin Jidai describe how the Shashin Seikatsu serial used compact cameras with date imprinting and experimented with moving the date backward or forward.^*31 Numbers burned into the frame look like objective evidence, yet changing the camera setting lets the author manufacture that time. Araki used the photograph's basic claim to believability while allowing document and fiction to occupy the same image.

Flowers, Sky, Illness, and Death

After Yoko's death, Araki published photobooks centered on Kūkei / Kinkei, long-term photographs of the sky, flowers, his cat Chiro, and his own illness. The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum's 2017 exhibition placed Kūkei / Kinkei, 2THE SKY, my Ender, and Sanzen Kū alongside Winter Journey within the larger genealogy of Sentimental Journey.^*1 Araki had photographed the sky before Yoko's death. Afterward it gained new weight as a subject he could return to over long periods, holding together time with the person he had lost, the dates of his own continued life, and the sky above Tokyo.

The early photographs in Sentimental Journey also shift in meaning when placed beside work made after Yoko's death. Recent criticism has noted how the honeymoon photograph made on a boat comes to carry both the record of an encounter and the memory of loss when viewed through the later Winter Journey and sky photographs.^*11 In Araki's re-editing, an old photograph enters a new temporal relationship each time it is published again.

Prostate cancer in 2008, Chiro's death in 2010, the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, and the loss of sight in Araki's right eye in 2013 also entered the work. Series such as Tokyo Zenritsusen Gan, Chiro Aishi, Hidari Me no Koi, and Higashi no Sora continued to turn the body and losses of a given moment into new photographic work.^*27 Death in these works is tied to concrete changes in the conditions of living and photographing: when an event changes his life, it also changes what and how he can photograph next.

I-Photography in the 1970s

During the 1970s, first-person photography emerged as an important current in Japan. Araki brought marriage, sex, meals, Tokyo, and death into the same continuous time of production, while expanding his means of publication from self-published editions to mass-circulation magazines.^*18 At a moment when social documentary photography and avant-garde efforts to fracture the urban image coexisted, he sustained a body of work in which the photographer's own lived relationships determined both content and editing.

Masahisa Fukase also made photobooks through his wife and family that addressed his own relationships and isolation. Araki pushed his public first person through magazine serials, diaries, self-published books, photobooks, and appearances on television and in magazines at a much faster pace. The “I” inside the photographs and the media persona “Arākī” reinforced each other, making the photographer's public image part of the world of the work.

Intimacy and Authorial Control

Intimate relationships create access to sleep, meals, illness, sex, and death. Within the same relationships, unequal authority can emerge over who decides what happens after the photograph is made—selection, sale, exhibition, and republication. Accusations by former models and protests during the #MeToo period raised questions that extended beyond consent at the moment of shooting to payment, later exhibitions, and the scope of reuse.^*6 In Araki's I-photography, intimacy produces both the force of the work and its ethical burden.

Yoko's own writing is also a primary source recording the marriage from the position of the person being photographed.^*20 Their interaction made the photographs possible, while Araki retained control over final selection, publication, and later reuse. The intimacy of the images and the asymmetry of editorial authority can be traced through these two facts together.

International Reception and Current Assessment

The Fondation Cartier exhibition in 1995 presented Araki through the Japanese I-novel, truth and fiction, censorship, and eroticism.^*25 The Barbican's major 2005 retrospective Self, Life, Death reorganized his vast production through the relations among self, daily life, and death.^*24 A 2016 retrospective at the Musée Guimet introduced a large body of work around everyday life, Tokyo, the body, and sex to French-speaking audiences.^*26 Taken together, these exhibitions trace the movement of Araki's work from the Japanese history of I-photography into international debates around intimacy, authorship, and sexuality in contemporary photography.

Tate presents Araki's work as a long-running intersection of private life, Tokyo, eroticism, and death.^*2 MoMA holds works from several bodies of photographs, including Sentimental Journey and images of Yoko.^*7 The Getty also holds his work, indicating the institutional consolidation of his international museum reception from the 1990s onward.^*8 Taka Ishii Gallery's CV, which compiles exhibitions in Japan and abroad, further traces how that reception expanded across photobooks, galleries, and museums.^*9

Satchin, Dentsu and the photocopier, shared life with Yoko, Shashin Jidai, pseudo-diaries, Tokyo, flowers and sky, and repeated re-editing form a long cycle in which life becomes photography and publication, and publication returns to the next phase of production. Araki's I-photography holds together the intensity of making intimate experience public and the question of who has the authority to select and reuse another intimate person's image. These two sides have made his work a central reference point for thinking about the “I” in Japanese photography since the 1970s.^*18

In interviews, Araki repeatedly speaks of photography and life as inseparable.^*10 Reading that self-mythologizing at some critical distance also makes it possible to examine the public persona “Arākī” as part of the production and circulation of the work.