Araki interviewed by Jérôme Sans

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

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Sometimes you paint colours on your black and white photos. Why?
Black and white photos represent death. Taking a photo is like killing the subject. Another way of presentation is the "Arakinema". These are photographs presented with sound and motion. Because monochrome is death, I revive the photos when I re-present them. I want to add sexual desire, passion, and warm body temperature. All this gives me an unconscious desire to paint them. It's not that I want to transform these black and white photos into paintings. I just want to make them closer to the photograph that is in my mind.

I'm not trying to do painting on a photographic ground, just trying to believe in the photos and reveal them by painting. I often choose colours like red and green, and I entitle these pictures "red-green sentimental colours." The layout of my book entitled The End of the Century is entirely made up of re-painted black-and-white photographs. The next book to follow, all in colour, will be the New Century Photography. These two books complete a cycle.

In your series of women in black and white, why do you systematically paint over the genital parts?
First of all, because of censorship since the genital parts must not be seen. In Japan there are many regulations. But I also prefer it that way. Finally, it is better for me to have a few rules. But it's a sign that I like to be mischievous, as though I touched them or placed my sex there. I feel as though I'm swimming back and forth between the colour bank, the bank of our world and the bank of the next world, the world of black and white. Depending on my feelings of the moment, I decide if I should go to the Paradise of black and white, stay in this colour world, or take the same subject by treating it simultaneously in colour or in black and white.

When I'm tired I float on my back and photograph the sky. Paris has the Seine, while Tokyo has two rivers, the Sumidagawa and the Arakawa. But Japan also has a river called the Sanzu no Kawa. It's the river which the Dead must cross on their way to Nirvana.

Time is never specified in your photos. What is your relationship to time?
A photograph takes place only at a certain instant. And this instant is unidentifiable. The instant is the eternal and the eternal is the instant. When the camera shutter is released, that's the eternal. Eternity is achieved by releasing the camera shutter and letting it descend. The action has an immediate connection. It's more an action than an art. I think it is fine to mix photos, regardless of when they were taken. On the other hand, I take photographs with printed dates so that they can be shown in chronological order. The flow of daily occurrence is a story. It is extremely dramatic and interesting. There are various meanings. But it would be, if anything, more interesting to show them in chronological order.

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