Big time Araki - Size does matter!

Limited edition of 2,500 copies

"This book reveals everything about me. It’s been a 60-year contract. Photography is love and death-that’ll be my epitaph." – Araki

The first title in our new TASCHEN limited series is Araki, an enormous and unique book with a print run of only 2,500 copies. The subject is Japanese photographer Araki, a man who talks about life through photographs. His powerful œuvre, decades’ worth of images, has been pared down to about 1,000 photographs which tell the story of Araki and comprise the ultimate retrospective collection of his work.

Known best for his intimate, snapshot-style images of women often tied up with ropes (kinbaku, Japanese rope-tying art) and of colorful, sensual flowers, Araki is an artist who reacts strongly to his emotions and uses photography to experience them more fully. Obsessed with women, Araki seeks to come closer to them through photography, using ropes like an embrace and the click of the shutter like a kiss. His work is at once shocking and mysteriously tender; a deeply personal artist, Araki is not afraid of his emotions nor of showing them to the world.

  • XXL-Format: 34.5 x 50 cm (13.4 x 19.7 in.)
  • Limited edition of 2,500 copies worldwide, each numbered and signed by Araki
  • Interviews by Jérôme Sans
  • Extensive bibliography and biography section
  • All color illustrations are color-separated and reproduced in Aniva, the finest reproduction technique available today, which provides unequalled intensity and color range. The duotone illustrations are made with Novatone, a special treatment for black and white images that produces exquisite tonal range and density
The artist:
Nobuyoshi Araki was born in Tokyo in 1940. Given a camera by his father at the ripe age of twelve, Araki has been taking pictures ever since. He studied photography and film at Chiba University and went into commercial photography soon after graduating. In 1970 he created his famous Xeroxed Photo Albums, which he produced in limited editions and sent to friends, art critics, and people selected randomly from the telephone book. Over the years, his bold, unabashed photographs of his private life have been the object of a great deal of controversy and censorship (especially in his native Japan), a fact that has not fazed the artist nor diminished his influence. To date, Araki has published over 350 books of his work.
Araki (Collector's Edition)

Araki

Nobuyoshi Araki
Hardcover in clamshell box, 13.6 x 19.7 in., 636 pages, $ 4,000
(June 2002)
Multilingual Edition: English, French, German
Availability: In Stock
  • Reviews
"It contains every wish, every desire, any form of beauty you can imagine and disturb you profoundly at the same time. It is food for thought. It is Araki."
— Sander van Hove, Amsterdam, Netherlands
  • What's up
Exhibition
Nobuyoshi Araki
May 02, 2013 - June 08, 2013
Michael Hoppen Gallery, 3 Jubilee Place, London SW3 3TD, Tel: +44 (0)20 7352 3649, United Kingdom
  • See also
Helmut Newton's SUMO (Collector's Edition)
Helmut Newton's SUMO
Hardcover with bookstand, 19.7 x 27.6 in., 464 pages, $ 15,000

The biggest and most expensive book production in the 20th century. Limited edition of 10,000 copies
Nobuyoshi Araki. Bondage, Art Edition A (Collector's Edition)
Nobuyoshi Araki. Bondage, Art Edition A
Japanese binding, 3 vols. in wooden box with print in portfolio, 11.4 x 13.0 in., 600 pages, $ 4,000

Limited edition of 50 copies, each coming with a signed color photograph by Nobuyoshi Araki