"The Photographs I Love" 1 – Araki

“I want to tie the real, because I can't tie anything else.

Neither Yoko's heart, the woman I love, nor anyone else's.

Souls cannot be tied. They are untouchable.

And precisely because souls are untouchable, I want to bind the visible.

Take possession of it, that's all for me.”

(Araki)

Araki, 1990

The first photographer I want to talk about is Nobuyoshi Araki. Born in Minowa, a working-class district of Tokyo, in 1940, Araki is difficult to approach and it's easy to fall into many stereotypes about his work.

Usually his books are placed on the lower shelves of bookstores, where there are erotic books, and his name is often associated with bondage, the art of tying women's bodies with ropes as an erotic practice, which he prefers to call by the original name Kinkabu (make knots with ropes).

He is a bizarre character, even in his physiognomy, with pointed hair and round glasses.

Nobuyoshi Araki

I have also written about him in a chapter in my book “Sweet Light”, and whenever I can I show his photographs during my workshops, although I always warn in case people want to go and see his other photographs, especially when I was in Malaysia and Indonesia. I know they could be obscene and disturbing.

In reality, its production is prolific and varied.

He photographed flowers, cloudy skies, the life of Tokyo with its inhabitants who go to work in the morning on the subway and euphoric in the nightclubs, and then many children.

In Malaysia I was lucky enough to buy a book of his in Japanese “Balcony of Love”, with photos taken all from the balcony of his house.

His black and white skies have such a sweet melancholy that it completely contrasts with the vibrant colors of the orchids and the faces of the women he portrays.

At the age of 12, he began shooting with the camera given to him by his father. At 23, he works for a photo agency. From that moment he will exhibit all over the world and publish over 200 books. 

Seeing him in self-portraits is always funny, like a perverse elf, but in interviews he is serious and romantic. 

He is continually asked about bondage photos and why he is so fascinated by tying up women and photographing them.

His answer is unsettling and beautiful:

“If I have been photographing bonded girls for a long time, it's not because I can bond them physically, but because I can't bond them mentally. What I want to photograph is someone's reaction when a glance is thrown at him, when he is touched or when he is spoken to.
You can photograph everything, but you can't dominate anyone's heart.”

Yoko Aoki

One of the recurring and central subjects of many of his shots is his wife, Yoko Aoki, whom he married in 1971.

He will make a long public story about their love, in one of the most intense books, for me, that are in circulation: “Sentimental Journey”.

Despite Araki appearing alongside many other women, even in sexual acts, his love for Yoko is total and reciprocated.

He photographs her continuously, in every moment of their life together, with their cat Chiro.

A love so great that it will be broken by his wife's illness and death in 1990.

The photograph I chose is one of the last taken of Yoko. He holds her hand at the point of death on the hospital bed. 

The following images will be those of her funeral, with Yoko's face among the flowers in the coffin, before it is closed and buried.

The book closes with their cat looking out the window as if waiting for her to return. That she will never come back.

Chiro

When they ask me why Araki? Why am I deeply fascinated by his work?

The answer for me is simple.

No one like him has managed to portray, in photography, the broad spectrum of human emotions, and the sides of our soul.

Although many reduce him to the realm of pornography, in his interviews he continually repeats the word “love”. And love, like our lives, does not have a single color, a single shade. In each of us there is a sense of beauty, anger, lust, melancholy, voracity, madness, sadness, passion...

Araki has never shied away from representing any of these aspects. His “sentimental journey” is not only the journey in love for his wife, but in the feelings of each of us.

That's why he went so far as to photograph even his wife in the coffin, making public what is the most private feeling of pain that any human being can experience: the death of a loved one.

The first time I saw the photo of the joined hands in the hospital bed, I was hypnotized. I could not look away.

This image will accompany me forever. It's epically brave and tremendously sweet.

And its power also comes – and above all – from its contextualization to his other photographs, the more obscene and erotic ones, those that make many people turn their gaze with disgust.

It is the sweetness that emerges from the obscene.

They are the two poles of existence.

Eros and Thanatos would say the ancient Greeks and Freud. Love and Death.

Araki, with his absurd spiked hair and mocking smile, reminds us that we can also look away, but in the end our lives always oscillate between these two poles. With everything in between.

Erotos

But not everyone has the courage to admit it, and show it.

He has always done, with sincerity.

“Love is hard to define. When you love a woman, she survives in photos and in your memory. And feelings survive, too. For example, I loved my wife, and traces of this remain in my feelings and my body, traces that survives in the photos. 
That is what it means to say you have loved someone.”

    (Araki)

 

READ ALSO:

• Rhymes and Assonances: Two Photographers At the Mirror 
• The Factory of Permanence 

Araki: “Sentimental Journey/Winter Journey” (Shinchosha, 1991)
Araki: “Sentimental May” (Heibonsha, 1997)
Araki: “Ai No Balcony” (Cite Publishing Ltd, 2014)
“Araki x Moriyama” (Cite Publishing Ltd, 2014)
“Araki” (Taschen, 2007)
“Araki” (FotoNote \ Contrasto, 2008)
“Effetto Araki” di Filippo Maggia (Skira, 2019)

Italian version