Araki interviewed by Jérôme Sans

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

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In my photographs I often appear in scenes containing bondage or sexual activity. I play the role of a midget in a Shunga painting. A secondary role as a spectator. After all, I prefer photographs to sex. Recently I have declined offers to date. Because everyone wants to have sex. They are not satisfied by only having dinner together. I won't do that any more, I prefer photography. In sex, I consider myself the second or third person. I just take advantage of sex to take good photos. I'm hard on sex the way I am on the woman I'm making love to. I am putting all this in the book because it will be published abroad and the Japanese won't see it. For me, photography's the essential thing.

What do you express in your photos?
I have nothing to say. There's no particular message in my photos. The messages come from my subjects, men or women. The subjects will convey what there is to say. I have things to photograph, so I've nothing to express. Right now, I'm showing my enjoyment of life rather than the sadness of death. Some people I know say that life is sad. But today I think the opposite. Death is sadder.

Why are you obsessed with women in your photographic work?
I think that all the attractions in life are implied in women. There are many essential elements: beauty, disgust, obscenity, purity ... much more than one finds in nature. In woman, there is sky and sea. In woman, there is the flower and the bud ...

A photographer who doesn't photograph women is no photographer, or only a third-rate one. Meeting a woman anywhere teaches you more about the world than reading Balzac. Whether it be a wife, a woman encountered by happenstance, or a prostitute, she will teach you about the world. In fact I build my life on meeting women and I have hardly read a book since primary school.

You are a cult figure in Japan for your iconography. How do you react to the paradox of censorship in your country, which, behind its façade and official manners, offers a second world of "forbidden pleasures" and in particular 'love hotels' for adulterous rendezvous?
I don't intend to take photographs to expose everything to the world. I content myself with showing what I think is a good photograph to an intimate group of friends. I am neither engaged socially nor artistically ... I have no particular ideology or ideas in terms of art, or thoughts or philosophy. It's as though I were a mischievous boy doing naughty things.

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