Nobuyoshi Araki
If other contemporary artists—in literature and cinema as much as the visual arts—have made the cities where they live and work the centre of their narrative discourse, Araki has assuredly created an image of Tokyo that shows a very personal point of view, which remains, at the same time, deeply rooted in the collective imagination of Japan’s capital city. His first sequences of empty urban landscapes, such as Tokyo Autumn (1972), were taken as he wandered through the strangely deserted streets of that emblematic city with a small Leica. He immediately discovered the famous red-light district of Shinjuku, where the endless variations of femininity exercised such a powerful fascination on him that they could be said to have determined his later work.
Two registers can be seen in his controversial work: a sentimentalism that verges on kitsch and an extreme eroticism that is at times downright pornographic, and in some series both are in evidence at the same time—for example, Tokyo Nude in the eighties, A’s Paradise in 1998, and Vaginal Flowers in 1999. The death of his wife in 1991 left a void that the artist sought to fill with photography, and since then he has refused to photograph anything that is not life, while discovering that every image involves a death: that of time stopped.
