Disappearing in a flash, like fireworks.

A lot of my pictures are foreplay but the best ones are orgasms.
Nobuyoshi Araki

A Happy B-day flies out to Nobuyoshi Araki, the devil-haired doyen of japanese erotic photography. Usually reviews of Nobuyoshi Araki's work start by pointing out the contradictions "monster," "genius," "pornographer," "artist," etc. The greatest negative routinely cited is his attitude toward women, photographed smeared with paint or bound in bondage ropes, images that reflect attitudes rooted in Edo's ancient past or Tokyo's modern sexual underworld. But this kind of moralistic approach doesn't quite fit a subject like Araki, who is more a force of nature, existing, in some Nietzschean space beyond good and evil, or at least "good and evil"(Japanese Times). Besides the avalanche of erotic subjects, Araki introduces into his work the entire range of possible communication techniques. He uses indifferently slides, posters, color photocopies, film, Polaroid, color and black-and-white photographs, large and small formats, to construct his erotic mosaics of solitude, which he displays on walls and ceilings or spreads out over the floor in museums and galleries. The idea is to record a world of silent bodies, moving in an icy sensuality where immaculate and obscene pleasures of sex and politics, day to day or novel, create a choreography of the senses in which the viewer is invited to take part as an active or passive.(Germano Celant, "Araki - Tokyomania," (Edition Mennour, Paris, 2000, pp. 4-5)

“A photographer who doesn’t photograph women is no photographer, or only a third-rate one. Meeting a woman anywhere teaches you more about the world than reading Balzac. Whether it be a wife, a woman encountered by happenstance, or a prostitute, she will teach you about the world. In fact I build my life on meeting women and I have hardly read a book since primary school.”
Nobuyoshi Araki

From Erotos 1993 Gelatin silver print Courtesy the artist

Courtesy: Jablonka Galerie, Köln/Berlin © Nobuyoshi Araki

Untitled (From Painting Flowers) 2004

"Sentiment, sentiment, sentiment, sentiment. Pressing the shutter release is like holding your breath for a second. But not to the point of killing yourself, thank you. It's just a state of suspended emotion. I just stop breathing during that moment. And when I see the images, I come back to life. It's like rising from the dead. But it's also fireworks. Disappearing in a flash, like fireworks. A love of fireworks is equally sentimental.”
Nobuyoshi Araki

With such a variety of subject matter, formal concepts are also useless. This leaves just one device that is the key to all Araki's art -- Araki himself. Looking at the people in the photographs -- and even the scenery -- we see the chemistry of their reaction to the cheerful, relentless, comical ball of energy that is Araki.
continue here (an interview)

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