notes

cam­eras and condoms

araki at the barbican

orig­i­nally pub­lished in the British Jour­nal of Photography

© ken edwards

nobuyoshi araki is japan’s most famous pho­tog­ra­pher, and a nation­ally revered fig­ure there.  his name and noto­ri­ety have long been rec­og­nized inter­na­tion­ally. he is also one of the most con­tro­ver­sial of pho­tog­ra­phers, and the open­ing this month of the largest exhi­bi­tion of his work to be held in britain, at the bar­bi­can, will no doubt be met with some­thing less than uni­ver­sal approval.

araki’s work attracts sharp reac­tions, from sup­port­ers and crit­ics alike.  to his allies, he is a flam­boy­ant and irre­press­ible per­former, a sen­su­al­ist in love with life; a poet of the sad­ness and tran­sience of plea­sure, and the ‘float­ing world’ of his native tokyo.  to his detrac­tors, he is merely a pornog­ra­pher and worse, a misog­y­nist whose rep­re­sen­ta­tions of women are abu­sive and repel­lent; whose cam­era reduces women’s bod­ies to objects of bru­tal sex­ual fantasy.

an enor­mous under­tak­ing, bring­ing together a huge col­lec­tion of araki’s out­put from a career which spans over four decades, the cura­tors have attempted to redress what they see as over-simplified mis­read­ings of araki’s work in its, until now, restricted expo­sure here.

one of the barbican’s own cura­to­r­ial staff, tomoko sato, together with akiko miki, of the palais de tokyo, paris, have been respon­si­ble for putting together this huge exhi­bi­tion.  in the four years it has taken to organ­ise, it has been their inten­tion that a much more sym­pa­thetic under­stand­ing of araki’s com­plex­ity might be gen­er­ated, which will get away from some of the simple-minded char­ac­ter­i­sa­tions and cliches which have been thrown at it  in the past.

sato and miki are attempt­ing to place araki as an artist with a par­tic­u­larly unique vision, which can only be appre­ci­ated in rela­tion to his place in his times, and in his own rela­tion­ship with japan­ese cul­ture and his­tory.  to accom­pany the exhi­bi­tion, phaidon press have pro­duced the most com­pre­hen­sive sur­vey of his work ever pub­lished in the eng­lish lan­guage. the same title as the exhi­bi­tion: ‘nobuyoshi araki: self, life, death’ this weighty 700 page vol­ume con­tains repro­duc­tions of much of the work shown in the exhi­bi­tion with many more exam­ples, from each of his major projects and pub­li­ca­tions, taken from every stage of his career.  edited by the cura­tors of the exhi­bi­tion, together with yoshiko isshiki, the gor­geously repro­duced prints are sup­ported with essays from ian jef­frey, yuko tanaka, akiko miki, and jonathon watkins. there is also an inter­view with araki, con­ducted by hans ulrich olbrist, and many of araki’s own writ­ings from orig­i­nal pub­li­ca­tions, trans­lated into eng­lish for the first time.

meet­ing araki at the gallery, i was aware these occa­sions can be some­thing of an event.  i had read of the ‘arak­i­zoku’, or in rough trans­la­tion, ‘araki gang­sters’; a coterie of mod­els and young admir­ers who accom­pany him on his every trip abroad.  now sixty four years old, araki still pos­sesses a seem­ingly inex­haustible store of energy and humour.  he arrives, fol­low­ers in train, cease­lessly gig­gling, cam­era shut­ters click­ing madly, the quiet last touches to the mount­ing of the exhi­bi­tion dis­rupted by a small man in trade­mark round sun­glasses and mous­tache march­ing about the gallery, mar­vel­ling at the bril­liance of his own work.

when asked why he takes so many pic­tures, he laughs, telling me that an ordi­nary per­son only takes a cam­era when they go out with the pur­pose of tak­ing pho­tographs. to him not car­ry­ing a cam­era, “…is like going out with­out trousers,” he pauses, “or with­out con­doms”. pro­lific hardly seems ade­quate, promis­cu­ous might be more apt.  he never stops. over three hun­dred mono­graphs pub­lished in japan, many of them have also been pub­lished abroad, along with count­less exhibitions.

he took his first pho­tographs, he says, as an eight year old, with a cam­era given to him by his father.  he later took up the study of pho­tog­ra­phy at chiba uni­ver­sity. broadly, there have been two con­tin­u­ous areas of inter­est for araki since his ear­li­est days, the pho­tog­ra­phy of women, and the streets and peo­ple of his native tokyo, in par­tic­u­lar the tra­di­tional work­ing class area where he grew up dur­ing and after the sec­ond world war, known as shi­ta­machi.  it was pho­tographs of this area which found his first suc­cesses as a seri­ous pho­tog­ra­pher, with a series which won him the first taiyo pho­tog­ra­phy prize in 1964. this charm­ing col­lec­tion, is a por­trayal of one boy and a group of friends as araki fol­lowed them round from day to day, play­ing and pos­ing for the camera.

when con­sid­ered against the total body of his out­put, it is work of his youth, and of its time — even quaint, in ‘satchin’, there are indi­ca­tions of some of the con­cerns which come to dom­i­nate his later work.  his fas­ci­na­tion with life and vital­ity, and nos­tal­gia for a dis­ap­pear­ing world, are both themes which come to obsess him in many of his later projects.

such nos­tal­gia is evi­dent in one of his most famous pub­li­ca­tions, and the piece of work which really made his name in pho­tog­ra­phy.  ‘sen­ti­men­tal jour­ney’, pub­lished in 1971, is a col­lec­tion of pho­tographs doc­u­ment­ing the hon­ey­moon, in inti­mate detail, of araki and his wife yoko, who he met at the dentsu adver­tis­ing cor­po­ra­tion where he worked after grad­u­a­tion. it was also at this time that araki embarked upon the dis­play of erot­ica, and sex­u­ally explicit pho­tographs, which were to become the most noto­ri­ous, and most widely known aspects of his work.

at the death of his wife, from can­cer, in 1990, araki pub­lished a diary-like work “win­ter jour­ney”, doc­u­ment­ing the last days of his wife, their life together, in all its aspects, and  the tragedy of her death. she was just 42.  this of course was a piv­otal point in his life and career.  shortly after, he pub­lished both works, in a com­bined vol­ume, “sen­ti­men­tal jour­ney / win­ter jour­ney” . despite the exu­ber­ance of his sub­se­quent pho­tographs, there is an aware­ness of death which per­me­ates his work from this point on.

one of the first things that peo­ple note, on meet­ing araki, is his great charm. the mis­chief in his eyes, the infec­tious gig­gle. his con­stant jok­ing and teas­ing.  per­haps a defence, it is instantly dis­arm­ing.  he is able to put peo­ple at their ease almost at once.  this abil­ity, cou­pled with his appar­ent tire­less­ness, can be seen reflected on the faces of the sub­jects of his por­trai­ture, in the peo­ple caught going about their busi­ness on the neigh­bour­hood streets, in the mas­sive ongo­ing project of pho­tograph­ing faces around japan.  from satchin onwards, araki has asserted that he, the pho­tog­ra­pher, should be a tan­gi­ble pres­ence in his work.  his pic­tures he says are a pri­vate act between him and his sub­ject. “a pho­to­graph”, he says “is a kind of inter­view.”  he goes into great detail about how he never changes lenses dur­ing a pho­to­shoot, never uses zoom.  he, the cam­era, the  sub­ject are all one, bound together in an inti­mate and pri­vate narrative.

“art’s a strange busi­ness, but essen­tially it’s all about doing what you shouldn’t do.”  with such dec­la­ra­tions, araki claims his right to pho­to­graph the nude in what­ever way he chooses, accord­ing to his own desires.

the parts of araki’s work for which he has become well-known, and most noto­ri­ous, are amply rep­re­sented in the show. it is impos­si­ble to obtain a bal­anced under­stand­ing of araki’s sex­ual images, with­out plac­ing them firmly within the con­text of his cul­ture. many of the erotic images show his nude mod­els (almost exclu­sively japan­ese girls and women) with opened or dis­carded tra­di­tional japan­ese kimono.  the back­drops are often tra­di­tional houses with paper screens, and tatami floor­ing.  they invoke the edo period, that two hun­dred year phase when japan was iso­lated from the out­side world.  araki’s pic­tures allude to ukiyo-e or ‘images of the float­ing world’, the pop­u­lar wood­block prints which were mass-produced in tokyo dur­ing that time, typ­i­fied by artists such as uta­maro.  the porno­graphic strain of this genre, known as shunga, is quite clearly being invoked in araki’s images of the erotic under­world of tokyo clubs and bars, with it’s bondage and cos-play clubs, sex shows and prostitutes.

the explicit images, araki him­self is quite happy to have referred to as porno­graphic, still gen­er­ate great unease.  we’ve been liv­ing with page three pic­tures, inter­net porn, and late-night tv sex­u­men­taries, long enough now for his work to have lost a great deal of its shock­ing edge.  alh­tough, despite his protes­ta­tions to the con­trary, many of the sex­ual images have a dis­turbingly clin­i­cal cold­ness about them, a relent­less prob­ing often to the point of tedium. some images seem merely puerile, with nei­ther wit nor warmth.  per­haps it’s the relent­less onslaught of image after image, naked body after naked body, where this work seems to lose its intended inti­macy.  the mod­els often regard the cam­era with a vacant bore­dom or pas­siv­ity, which will make the viewer won­der at the claims of friendly com­plic­ity.  this mas­sive out­put of porno­graphic or quasi-pornographic work, for araki, is evi­dence of his genius, for oth­ers evi­dence of obssessive-compulsive behav­iour,  he has var­ied his prac­tice over the years:  there are large scale carefully-lit, stu­dio shots, casual late-night encoun­ters in karaoke bars snapped with his leica.  he went through a phase of pro­duc­ing thou­sands of polaroid images, given their own room in the show.  he some­times used paints and chem­i­cals to attack the sur­faces of pic­tures, in ges­tures which really do shock in their violence.

while women in araki’s work are often served up as con­sum­able objects, his other, non-human sub­jects also some­times seem to aspire to the porno­graphic.  his flower pho­tographs, for exam­ple, which fill an entire wall of one of the down­stairs spaces, dis­play their bio­log­i­cal func­tions with a sen­su­al­ity and las­civ­i­ous­ness which echoes the nudes.  the flow­ers are often decay­ing and dying.  araki con­tends that sex­u­al­ity is ever linked with the cycle of birth, death, re-birth, some­thing cen­tral to his bud­dhist back­ground. “flow­ers” says araki “have the smell of death”. a com­ment which he made not with regard to the large flower prints he pro­duced in the 90s, but in the por­trayal of the ill­ness and death of his wife.

in recent years, there seems to be a marked ten­dency for araki, to revisit the neigh­bour­hood tokyo of his child­hood years, and early career.  say it qui­etly, but he seems to be mel­low­ing. in tokyo story, and towns cities streets, we are pre­sented with a really joy­ful cel­e­bra­tion of the urban chaos of one of the world’s most com­plex cities.  these pic­tures are like a long love let­ter to many faces of his home town and an end­lessly fas­ci­nat­ing por­trait of its streets and people.

it’s very dif­fi­cult to con­dense such an enor­mous and diverse body of work as this, with­out reduc­ing it to an absurdly sim­ple for­mula.  what this exhi­bi­tion does achieve, is to sweep away once and for all any notion that araki is sim­ply a char­la­tan, or a self-promoting clown, with an unsavoury fond­ness for rope and naked women. what is left is the stag­ger­ing out­put of a prodi­giously tal­ented and dri­ven artist.

“araki: self, life, death”

bar­bi­can art gallery

6 octo­ber 2005 – 22 jan­u­ary 2006

“nobuyoshi araki: self, life, death”

pub­lished by phaidon press

£45.00. (£39.95 at exhibition)

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