Date: 30-11-1999
Owning Institution:
Publication: Sunday Telegraph Features    
Subject:   Now  

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  “Araki” because it phonetically  transcribes the typical Japanese mispronunciation of the word “anarchy”. Between them Taschen, his publishers, and the Shine Gallery in London, who are putting on a sizeable exhibition of his editioned photographs, are doing their best to spice up the Queen’s Golden Jubilee month with a little bit of (so to speak) Araki in the UK.

Araki by Araki contains a fair quota of the sort of pictures which, for reasons of taste, decency, law and Sunday lunch digestion, cannot with impunity be reproduced in the pages of a family newspaper. One “chapter” of such images records the impressively gymnastic goings-on in Tokyo’s live sex clubs; another shows a number of his female models enduring elaborate and ritualistic forms of physical bondage (a particular Araki speciality, that): multiple mises-en-scene of polymorphous perversity in which naked geisha girls are shown tied to bedposts, trussed to chairs or dangling from ropes attached to hooks in the ceiling. Araki’s apparently more innocent work – his portraiture, his photography of Tokyo city life, his observation of flowers – is also informed by a distinctly un-innocent sensibility. This is the source of its undeniable weirdness (pop music’s princess of weirdness, Bjork, somehow unsurprisingly, is a big fan of Araki) and also its power to intrigue. A beautiful girl on a bar stool turns to face the camera, drink in hand, the living embodiment of a chance encounter. A pair of richly kimonoed, stiffly upstanding geishas gaze quizzically at their observer as, in the background, an early evening sun sets behind trees in a beautiful parkland setting. A woman sits for her portrait, perfectly coiffed and made-up, seemingly impassive and aloof but with a look in her eyes which suggests that other emotions churn underneath the mask. Behind even the most apparently formal or conventional of Araki’s photographs there is, almost invariably, a sense of something else going on, either actually or potentially. They have an ominous quality, that compels attention. The promise of sex or the threat of violence never seem far away, no matter what the subject.

Perhaps these pictures partly reflect the contradictions of life in Japan in general – oscillating between highly codified patterns of social behaviour and extremes of self-abandonment – and Tokyo in particular. Araki was brought up near Yoshiwara, the city’s red light district, where he spent much time as a child. It may have been then that he acquired his habit of seeing everything in his world (even just food on a plate, or garden ornaments, or  toys, or the displays in a Shinjuku department store) through a filter of morbid eroticism. His photographs of flowers are among the most striking and original of his pictures. Often seen in extreme close-up, they seem to bloom and wilt before the eye – to pullulate with reproductive energy and, at the same time, to rot sweetly with incipient decay. It as if he admires their loveliness but also cannot help punishing them for it by fixing, and fixing on, their vulnerability (he treats them, in a sense, rather like the women in his work). These lush and vivid blooms are the epitome of  Araki’s photography: a knowingly perverse vision of beauty, accompanied by the strong stench of corruption.