Araki interviewed by Jérôme Sans
"This book displays my life, the women, my wife, and city streets..." - Nobuyoshi Araki
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My favourite colour is red. This colour conveys the complicity between life and death. That's why I asked the owner of the bar where we are to paint the entire interior red. Besides, the place is called "Bar RED". When the B29 American incendiary bombers dyed Japanese skies red, I found it very beautiful. I was five years old. The reason why I love red is because of that experience. From this childhood, I developed all my photographic work. Even if I don't live in this area, my roots are there. I am impregnated with this environment, by these traditional wooden houses. "Sympathy" and "sentimentality" permeate me. I was raised in an environment where morning glories bloom in the alley. That gave my life orientation. Paris also has its populous districts, all made of stone; they are very dry but not like those in Japan which are very humid. Today, Japan no longer has this humidity, concrete and stone are everywhere. There are too many robots and fewer voices from the flesh. The things I want to photograph are disappearing. When the world goes wrong, so do photographs. They become uninteresting. That's my epitaph, at sixty, for the end of the world.
Your work is all about women.
Although I had to emerge from my mother's womb to take photos, women are photography incarnate. One of my first photos of a woman was of a young girl I was secretly fond of in primary school. When I became an adult, a woman immediately meant her sex. I took photos of genitals at close range and described this position in Sur-sentimentalist Manifest which I wrote in 1970 when I started taking pictures of women. At that time, I thought I had to become an anarchist. So I called myself "Ararky". That was the beginning. I was then working for Dentsu, a Japanese ad firm. I met Yoko, who soon became my wife. Until then I took photographs of women as objects, through their genitals. As soon as I photographed Yoko, I began to capture the relationship between me and the woman in front of me. It was the first time I was taking a woman instead of an object. From our relationship, my tree has many women branches. Although I always say that I was faithful to my wife and that my work was focused on her, I was already at the time photographing lots of other girls. This book reveals these things for the first time and it will expose everything of myself. There's a statute of limitations: I'm sixty now. After my wife's death, I went on taking more and more women. So, lots of ramifications, lots of leaves (of women) have emerged around me and it's been paradise!
Can your passion for sex be considered a contemporary version of the Shunga, the erotic paintings from the Edo period?
I'd like to take photos similar to Shunga, but I haven't reached that level yet. There is bashfulness in Shunga. The genitals are visible, but the rest is hidden by the kimono. In other words, they don't show everything. They are hiding a secret. Shunga doesn't just reveal sex, but a loving secret between two people, between a man and a woman.
Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
My favourite colour is red. This colour conveys the complicity between life and death. That's why I asked the owner of the bar where we are to paint the entire interior red. Besides, the place is called "Bar RED". When the B29 American incendiary bombers dyed Japanese skies red, I found it very beautiful. I was five years old. The reason why I love red is because of that experience. From this childhood, I developed all my photographic work. Even if I don't live in this area, my roots are there. I am impregnated with this environment, by these traditional wooden houses. "Sympathy" and "sentimentality" permeate me. I was raised in an environment where morning glories bloom in the alley. That gave my life orientation. Paris also has its populous districts, all made of stone; they are very dry but not like those in Japan which are very humid. Today, Japan no longer has this humidity, concrete and stone are everywhere. There are too many robots and fewer voices from the flesh. The things I want to photograph are disappearing. When the world goes wrong, so do photographs. They become uninteresting. That's my epitaph, at sixty, for the end of the world.
Your work is all about women.
Although I had to emerge from my mother's womb to take photos, women are photography incarnate. One of my first photos of a woman was of a young girl I was secretly fond of in primary school. When I became an adult, a woman immediately meant her sex. I took photos of genitals at close range and described this position in Sur-sentimentalist Manifest which I wrote in 1970 when I started taking pictures of women. At that time, I thought I had to become an anarchist. So I called myself "Ararky". That was the beginning. I was then working for Dentsu, a Japanese ad firm. I met Yoko, who soon became my wife. Until then I took photographs of women as objects, through their genitals. As soon as I photographed Yoko, I began to capture the relationship between me and the woman in front of me. It was the first time I was taking a woman instead of an object. From our relationship, my tree has many women branches. Although I always say that I was faithful to my wife and that my work was focused on her, I was already at the time photographing lots of other girls. This book reveals these things for the first time and it will expose everything of myself. There's a statute of limitations: I'm sixty now. After my wife's death, I went on taking more and more women. So, lots of ramifications, lots of leaves (of women) have emerged around me and it's been paradise!
Can your passion for sex be considered a contemporary version of the Shunga, the erotic paintings from the Edo period?
I'd like to take photos similar to Shunga, but I haven't reached that level yet. There is bashfulness in Shunga. The genitals are visible, but the rest is hidden by the kimono. In other words, they don't show everything. They are hiding a secret. Shunga doesn't just reveal sex, but a loving secret between two people, between a man and a woman.
Page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
