Nobuyoshi Araki

I guess you can say I am a fan of the photo’s by Nobuyoshi Araki. This 65 year old Japanese photographer sure knows how to take pictures! Although mostly a bit on the rough (pornographic) side, he also has very subtle work. Watch the master at work? Buy his Arakimentari on dvd. Check out his official site (which unfortunately is mainly in Japanese) and his photobooks at Amazon. And you can still buy the 2000 Euro Limited Edtion Araki book from Taschen.Araki interviewed by Jérôme Sans @ Taschen.com

Article about an exhibition of Araki’s work in London.

Excerpt from the article:

Are they art or porn, I ask him? “Each work definitely has a pornographic aspect,” he says. “Otherwise it would just be eroticism, which is clean, intellectual – and uninteresting. I’m upgrading them with a bit of dirt. We all like dirt.” They’re porn, then. But porn that the models themselves relish making. Women come up to Araki in the street and beg to be photographed by him.

“All the girls who do the bondage really enjoy it,” Araki says. But then why do they look so serious? “The rope is like a lover touching the body. It’s serious love, I suppose.” At that he leans forward and, in double-speed, gently throttles me with my own neck scarf. “Bondage!” he guffaws.

Araki says his work is really only about himself; it’s an ongoing process of personal exposure. Much of it, his portraits of children above all, reveals his marvellous, contagious joie de vivre. But other parts show the monstrous eccentricity of a man who uses plastic dinosaurs as his alter ego and describes vaginas as the origin of all visual art.