Araki
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 oeuvre, 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.
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 oeuvre, 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 phased the artist nor diminished his influence. To date, Araki has published over 350 books of his work.
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Araki |
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Helmut Newton's SUMO Hardcover, Bookholder, 19.7 x 27.6 in., 464 pages, $ 15000 The biggest and most expensive book production in the 20th century. |
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TASCHEN 25 Coming soon Araki. Tokyo Lucky Hole Softcover, flaps, 5.5 x 7.7 in., 704 pages, $ 14.99 Welcome to the era of the no-panties coffee shop: Tokyo "entertainment centers" in the early 1980s photographed by Araki |
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 LaChapelle, Artists and ProstitutesHardcover in a clamshell box, 13.6 x 19.7 in., 698 pages, $ 4500 The Fellini of photography. Limited edition of 2,500 copies |