To judge by his new book Nobuyoshi Araki, the self-proclaimed bad boy of Japanese art photography, has thoroughly mastered the gnomically intriguing faux-naif sound-bite. In the interview that serves as preface to his kaleidoscope of pictures, the photographer proclaims his love of the female sex. “Women have all the charms of life itself,” says Araki, in full Mystical Sage mode; “they have all the essential attributes: beauty, ugliness, obscenity, purity … much more so than nature. In woman there is sea and sky. In woman there is the bud and the flower … A photographer who doesn’t take women is no photographer, or only a third-rate one. Women teach you much more about the world than reading Balzac. Whether it’s your wife, a one-night stand or a prostitute, women teach you how the world goes round. I’ve built my life on meeting women. Besides, I stopped reading when I left primary school.”
If women are his books Araki has, over the years, compiled an impressive library. The photographer and professional agent provocateur, who turned sixty a couple of years ago, appears in a youthfully energetic pose on the front cover of Araki by Araki – a phonebook-fat retrospective of a lifetime’s snapping – wearing a dress shirt, an extravagantly patterned bowtie, John Lennon-style dark glasses and a pair of plastic devil’s horns. Much of his self-conscious devilry has involved the female sex. In his native Japan he has frequently been in hot water for his attempts to blur the boundary between art and pornography. He first came to prominence in the early 1970s with a portfolio of pictures of women’s vaginas. At around the same time he published his so-called Sur-sentimentalist Manifesto and adopted the surname under which he still goes. Considering himself an anarchist, he apparently chose...
