Nobuyoshi Araki, Born in 1940 in Tokyo, is a Japanese photographer.

An extremely prolific artist, Araki essentially spread his work in the form of albums. A figure of the world of media and culture in Japan, he has also published numerous essays and interviews. He regularly uses the signature of Arākī ラ ラ ー キ ー which evokes in Japanese the word "anarchy" (anākī)

His life

Araki was born and raised in Minowa district in the lower city of Tokyo. His father, Araki Chōtarō, is a small craftsman who practices amateur photography. Graduated from the engineering department of Chiba University in 1963, with a specialization in photography and film direction, he began his career as a photographer in the advertising agency Dentsū. As early as 1964, he was awarded the Taiy prix Prize for "Satchin", a series of photographs of children. In 1971, he married Aoki Yōko. In the wake, he publishes his own travel sentimental journey, which documents, halfway between reality and fiction, his wedding and his wedding night. In 1972, he left Dentsū and realized several projects between Mail art and performance.
In 1974, he founded with Fukase Masahisa, Tōmatsu Shōmei, Hosoe Eikō and Moriyama Daidō the school of photography Workshop.

In 1977, he left the neighborhood of his childhood to settle in Komae in the western suburbs of the capital. In 1982, he moved again to Gōtokuji in the district of Setagaya where he now resides. In 1979 he visited New York for the first time for an exhibition, but it was not until 1985 that he began exhibiting regularly abroad. Between 1988 and 1993, his work was the subject of various police measures, the representation of the genitals and the pubic hair being considered "obscene" within the meaning of the Japanese law. The various polemics that followed contributed to a more tolerant application of the law in the case of artistic productions and soft porn.

His Work

The themes of the photographs of Araki are above all Tokyo, sex and death. Araki considers that photography is linked to sex and death, two impulses that are inseparable to him. He also photographed many naked women, starting with his wife. For him, nudity is in the portrait and not in the body. He also photographed flowers, a female metaphor. In his book Love Hotel3$, published in 2004, he explains the situations that led him to photograph naked women.

Many of her photographs are dated, a way of signifying an adhesion of photography to the present she documents. But Araki also knows how to blur this relation of photography to a present-past, for example by cheating on the dates.

His work brought him a great notoriety with the Japanese and international public: his photos are mostly accompanied by texts in the mode of a diary. Although Araki has always contested his artistic quality in the romantic sense of the term, his works are part of the avant-garde art of his generation.

Araki inaugurated a kind of new photographic approach, where the objective follows the life of the artist as closely as possible in a self-fictive vein arranged with great mastery. Before this time, a breach in this originally cloisonné medium, of which many plastic photographers or contemporary artists will follow the trace beginning with Sophie Calle, Nan Goldin or Roman Opalka.