Araki interviewed by Jérôme Sans

"This book displays my life, the women, my wife, and city streets..." - Nobuyoshi Araki

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At the moment I love Chiro, my cat, and flowers. The cat represents flesh while the flowers are genital. It's the feeling of "beloving". Being at home, my feelings for Chiro grow when he just naturally comes up to me. Or waking up in the morning and looking at a flower. I photograph them not from a distance but at close range. It's a spontaneous feeling that comes to me very naturally. These instant feelings are what I love, even if I have absolute feelings for photography.

For me love is the same thing, a question of proximity, familiarity, that one can touch. Love cannot be found on the Internet, love seems impossible to me. Love implies a proximity of smells, sensations, environment. So I photograph familiar people, my neighbourhood. That's photography. For example, I am taking a photograph of you because I met you today.

You've taken pictures in many Asian cities, but Tokyo is at the centre of your universe. Your work conveys a strong sense of belonging to your immediate environment. Do you think there is a correlation between it and those old traditional Japanese houses where there's a sensation of shared intimacy?
When I mention Tokyo, I'm not interested in all of Tokyo, but only the places I'm familiar with and where I go on a regular basis. I don't go taking photographs of everything, but just Shinjuku or the neighbourhoods which I know well. Photography is synonymous with what relates to me. I don't go somewhere simply to take photographs.

If I use the word "introduction" to speak of my work, it would be an "introduction" to a woman I am in love with, a place, a favorite moment.

Everything is determined by the environment in which you were brought up. I was born in Minowa, the populous district of Tokyo, in a traditional little house divided into two units, where everything was close together. One could go from one house to another. It was a place where your backdoor neighbour would bring you all kinds of things. They would bring you food, saying it was leftovers, when in fact it had been cooked specially for you. It was a very humane place. Because I was raised there, I am that way.

Minowa's on the outskirts of the Taito-ku district in the north-eastern part of Tokyo. If you go further north to where Takeshi Kitano was born, people are more oppressive (he winks). I lived near Yoshiwara, the red light district, and right next door was a temple called "Jokanji" where there were the graves of prostitutes without families. That's where I played as a child ... There were graves (death) and prostitutes! My entire life was marked by this environment. The mud of the Shitamchi district is still on me! Life and death were at large there. So life and death have seemed quite natural to me since I was very young.

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