After being shown at the Barbican Art Gallery in 2005, the first retrospective of the Japanese photographer Araki is now presented in Stockholm’s Kulturhuset. About four thousands clichés review forty years of relentless work, a feature amplified after his wife’s death in 1990.
Araki can be seen as a paradoxical artist, fascinated by women and eroticism, as well as traditional themes such as Japanese culture, cities (especially Tokyo) and death. The interaction between those two tendencies creates an extraordinary tension, sometimes enhanced by the apposition of dozens of clichés in a same frame, like in mangas. Avoiding any signs of vulgarity, Araki’s passion for women is an echo of his own lust for life. Alike Mapplethorpe, his lecherous photos of voluptuous flowers openly symbolize women’s sexual organs. Sometimes contemplating, Araki also catches punctual scenes: a naked woman laughing in her bed or eating food; people crossing the street… Modern life is Araki’s second muse. He reveals the intensity of small details in buildings, objects and people’s attitude. Series about Tokyo were often touched up during the developing. At some point he burnt the negatives or put color paint on it.
Something striking is that most of the pictures represent individuals. When people are close to each other it is only because two separate photos have been stick together. As if they had been abandoned but did not feel lonely. In the same perspective, very few of his models actually have a name; they are either totally anonymous or called ambiguously. They are both unique and exchangeable.
Alternating between black and white pictures and more or less colored ones, his work reflects the infinite diversity of life, but also its temporary dimension, indisputably finished. Time and space are manifolded. The amount of clichés blurs our vision of life. Indoor scenes are timeless, for there is no day or night but only artificial lights in closed rooms. And those rooms could be hotel rooms, the photographer’s studio, his place, or anywhere else.
Highly influenced by ancient Japan, Araki also took pictures of geishas, without precising if they were models or real ones. But his most controversial works are dealing with the theme of bondage: in these photos, naked young women are bound in ropes, sometimes hanging over the ground, looking mute and helpless. A centuries-old sexual phantasm specific to Japan which Araki has “modernized” and made his. Looking at these erotic visions, the eye of the viewer seems to rape the picture, and sublimes his subconscious desires.
Araki’s interest for the living necessarily implies the awareness of death. He is a bulimic artist trying to capture every moment of beauty and pleasure of life, for both are always linked. The “self” only appears under the shape of the photographer’s way of seeing the world, hardly ever in an autobiographic manner. It is a constant stream of consciousness, full of tension, positive fears and energy. Araki perfectly illustrates Roland Barthes’s sentence: “Death is the eidos of photography”. It does not eliminate human anxiety towards death, but it aims at overcoming it.
Araki can be seen as a paradoxical artist, fascinated by women and eroticism, as well as traditional themes such as Japanese culture, cities (especially Tokyo) and death. The interaction between those two tendencies creates an extraordinary tension, sometimes enhanced by the apposition of dozens of clichés in a same frame, like in mangas. Avoiding any signs of vulgarity, Araki’s passion for women is an echo of his own lust for life. Alike Mapplethorpe, his lecherous photos of voluptuous flowers openly symbolize women’s sexual organs. Sometimes contemplating, Araki also catches punctual scenes: a naked woman laughing in her bed or eating food; people crossing the street… Modern life is Araki’s second muse. He reveals the intensity of small details in buildings, objects and people’s attitude. Series about Tokyo were often touched up during the developing. At some point he burnt the negatives or put color paint on it.
Something striking is that most of the pictures represent individuals. When people are close to each other it is only because two separate photos have been stick together. As if they had been abandoned but did not feel lonely. In the same perspective, very few of his models actually have a name; they are either totally anonymous or called ambiguously. They are both unique and exchangeable.
Alternating between black and white pictures and more or less colored ones, his work reflects the infinite diversity of life, but also its temporary dimension, indisputably finished. Time and space are manifolded. The amount of clichés blurs our vision of life. Indoor scenes are timeless, for there is no day or night but only artificial lights in closed rooms. And those rooms could be hotel rooms, the photographer’s studio, his place, or anywhere else.
Highly influenced by ancient Japan, Araki also took pictures of geishas, without precising if they were models or real ones. But his most controversial works are dealing with the theme of bondage: in these photos, naked young women are bound in ropes, sometimes hanging over the ground, looking mute and helpless. A centuries-old sexual phantasm specific to Japan which Araki has “modernized” and made his. Looking at these erotic visions, the eye of the viewer seems to rape the picture, and sublimes his subconscious desires.
Araki’s interest for the living necessarily implies the awareness of death. He is a bulimic artist trying to capture every moment of beauty and pleasure of life, for both are always linked. The “self” only appears under the shape of the photographer’s way of seeing the world, hardly ever in an autobiographic manner. It is a constant stream of consciousness, full of tension, positive fears and energy. Araki perfectly illustrates Roland Barthes’s sentence: “Death is the eidos of photography”. It does not eliminate human anxiety towards death, but it aims at overcoming it.
Décembre 2007
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