Nobuyoshi Araki / Crossing Boundaries

Crossing Boundaries

An Interview with Nobuyoshi Araki

Hyewon Yi

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Volume 1, Issue 2, Spring 2011

This interview with Nobuyoshi Araki was conducted on October 28, 2010, in Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan by Hyewon Yi, as part of her research on participant/observer photography. Yuko Teshima Fujii assisted with interpretation during the interview and translation of the transcript. Kikuko Tanaka also assisted with translation of the transcript. The interviewer thanks Mashiyama Takayuki of Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo, for arranging the interview, reviewing the transcript, expediting permission to publish the accompanying photographs, and countless other courtesies.  Warning: The interview contains sexually explicit language.

Nobuyoshi Araki / Intimate photography

Nobuyoshi Araki

NOBUYOSHI ARAKI

Intimate photography: 

Tokyo, nostalgia and sex

BY C.D. Liddell

26 november 2006

Usually reviews of Nobuyoshi Araki’s work start by pointing out the contradictions “monster,” “genius,” “pornographer,” “artist,” etc. The greatest negative routinely cited is his attitude toward women, photographed smeared with paint or bound in bondage ropes, images that reflect attitudes rooted in Edo’s ancient past or Tokyo’s modern sexual underworld.

But this kind of moralistic approach doesn’t quite fit a subject like Araki, who is more a force of nature, existing, in some Nietzschean space beyond good and evil, or at least “good and evil” as defined by middle-class Western journalists like Adrian Searle in The Guardian. In a review of the show “Nobuyoshi Araki: Self, Life, Death,” at London’s Barbican last year, Searle slyly hinted that Araki’s depictions of women placed him beyond the pale of some liberal leftwing acceptability, before trying to find some level on which he could be “redeemed.’‘

Nobuyoshi Araki / Sentimental Journey

ENTIMENTAL JOURNEY

by Nobuyoshi Araki

Nobuyoshi Araki / A Photographer

Nobuyoshi Araki

QUOTE

A photographer who doesn’t photograph women is no photographer, or only a third-rate one. Meeting a woman anywhere teaches you more about the world than reading Balzac. Whether it be a wife, a woman encountered by happenstance, or a prostitute, she will teach you about the world. In fact I build my life on meeting women and I have hardly read a book since primary school.