Nobuyoshi Araki Interviewed by Jérôme Sans for Taschen

"This book displays my life, the women, my wife, and city streets..." - Nobuyoshi Araki

Why call your book "Araki by Araki" when you have edited most of your own books yourself? Was there something special about this one?

NA: I turned sixty at the end of the 20th century. In Japan, a sixtieth birthday, called the Kanreki, is a specific date representing a cycle of life that finishes while another one begins. It's a passage, a renaissance. For this occasion, I thought of compiling all my works. I've kept some of the best for the end, like "Picasso's Picasso". First, I thought of publishing everything myself in Japan. But finally it seemed more interesting to do it through another person's perspective, and most particularly a foreigner's. For me, the "other person" is always a foreigner. And this time, it is indeed a foreigner, which is very fresh. Ultimately, this book is not "Araki by Araki", but "Araki by TASCHEN". I think it remains just as interesting. When a foreigner chooses my works, it can reveal to unknown aspects of myself. I've had many exhibits abroad (in Austria at the Wiener Secession, in Italy at the Museo-Centro per l'arte contemporanea Pecci de Prato ...) and each time I encountered a similar experience. I had already found that things which did not seem particularly important to me were interesting to others.

Generally, one believes that ideas or thoughts enter photography through editing or cropping. This does not work for me. My photos convey lots of strength and energy on their own. I can't allow for them to be handed over to an editor, because I am quite certain of the outlook and the strength of my photos. Normally, it becomes the outlook of the one editing them. But I have confidence in my photographs. They never change.

How does this book differ from the other books?

NA: This book shows people my life, the women, my wife, and city streets ... They're like branches of my emotions! They have been compiled as the trunk of a large tree, and I am expecting it to bloom like a flower! Araki by Araki is an epitaph for my sixty years. I've been taking photographs since I came into this world. I was no sooner out of my mother's womb, than I turned around and photographed her sex! Photography is the first thing I shall do after my reincarnation! This is my dying will of sixty years. It is a testament which reads: photography is love and death ...

How do you define love?

NA: Love is hard to define. When you love a woman, she survives in a photo or a memory. And feelings survive, too. For example, I loved my wife, and traces of this remain in my feelings and my body, traces that survive in the photos. (I am mentioning my wife only because otherwise there could be a problem!)

At the moment I love Chiro, my cat, and flowers. The cat represents flesh while the flowers are genital. It's the feeling of "beloving". Being at home, my feelings for Chiro grow when he just naturally comes up to me. Or waking up in the morning and looking at a flower. I photograph them not from a distance but at close range. It's a spontaneous feeling that comes to me very naturally. These instant feelings are what I love, even if I have absolute feelings for photography.

For me love is the same thing, a question of proximity, familiarity, that one can touch. Love cannot be found on the Internet, love seems impossible to me. Love implies a proximity of smells, sensations, environment. So I photograph familiar people, my neighbourhood. That's photography. For example, I am taking a photograph of you because I met you today.

You've taken pictures in many Asian cities, but Tokyo is at the centre of your universe. Your work conveys a strong sense of belonging to your immediate environment. Do you think there is a correlation between it and those old traditional Japanese houses where there's a sensation of shared intimacy?

NA: When I mention Tokyo, I'm not interested in all of Tokyo, but only the places I'm familiar with and where I go on a regular basis. I don't go taking photographs of everything, but just Shinjuku or the neighbourhoods which I know well. Photography is synonymous with what relates to me. I don't go somewhere simply to take photographs.

If I use the word "introduction" to speak of my work, it would be an "introduction" to a woman I am in love with, a place, a favorite moment.

Everything is determined by the environment in which you were brought up. I was born in Minowa, the populous district of Tokyo, in a traditional little house divided into two units, where everything was close together. One could go from one house to another. It was a place where your backdoor neighbour would bring you all kinds of things. They would bring you food, saying it was leftovers, when in fact it had been cooked specially for you. It was a very humane place. Because I was raised there, I am that way.

Minowa's on the outskirts of the Taito-ku district in the north-eastern part of Tokyo. If you go further north to where Takeshi Kitano was born, people are more oppressive (he winks). I lived near Yoshiwara, the red light district, and right next door was a temple called "Jokanji" where there were the graves of prostitutes without families. That's where I played as a child... there were graves (death) and prostitutes! My entire life was marked by this environment. The mud of the Shitamchi district is still on me! Life and death were at large there. So life and death have seemed quite natural to me since I was very young.

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.

NA: 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?

NA: 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.

In my photographs I often appear in scenes containing bondage or sexual activity. I play the role of a midget in a Shunga painting. A secondary role as a spectator. After all, I prefer photographs to sex. Recently I have declined offers to date. Because everyone wants to have sex. They are not satisfied by only having dinner together. I won't do that any more, I prefer photography. In sex, I consider myself the second or third person. I just take advantage of sex to take good photos. I'm hard on sex the way I am on the woman I'm making love to. I am putting all this in the book because it will be published abroad and the Japanese won't see it. For me, photography's the essential thing.

What do you express in your photos?

NA: I have nothing to say. There's no particular message in my photos. The messages come from my subjects, men or women. The subjects will convey what there is to say. I have things to photograph, so I've nothing to express. Right now, I'm showing my enjoyment of life rather than the sadness of death. Some people I know say that life is sad. But today I think the opposite. Death is sadder.

Why are you obsessed with women in your photographic work?

NA: I think that all the attractions in life are implied in women. There are many essential elements: beauty, disgust, obscenity, purity ... much more than one finds in nature. In woman, there is sky and sea. In woman, there is the flower and the bud ...

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.

You are a cult figure in Japan for your iconography. How do you react to the paradox of censorship in your country, which, behind its façade and official manners, offers a second world of "forbidden pleasures" and in particular 'love hotels' for adulterous rendezvous?

NA: I don't intend to take photographs to expose everything to the world. I content myself with showing what I think is a good photograph to an intimate group of friends. I am neither engaged socially nor artistically ... I have no particular ideology or ideas in terms of art, or thoughts or philosophy. It's as though I were a mischievous boy doing naughty things.

I think this attitude reflects a paradox of Japan, which has laws against pornography.

NA: Yes, and that's been continuing since the Edo period. It may seem ambiguous, paradoxical. Even if a strict law on censorship has been established, everything and anything still exists in Japan despite it all. It's always very tangled and complex. There is the glamor of dissimilarity. And it happens that paradoxical things get mixed up. In Japan, you can tie up a girl and take a photograph of her without being condemned to death. It's unexpectedly benevolent. Christian countries are much severe in that sense. Europe is more tolerant. Even if the Vatican does not approve, it still accepts my work. The United States is particularly strict and severe. I don't take any risks showing pictures of little girls or women in bondage over there. Compared to the Edo period, I think the period we're living through is sexually impoverished, but there's still a confused atmosphere about sex that I like.

Why is bondage a recurrent theme in your work?

NA: Kinbaku (knots with ropes) are different from bondage. I only tie up a woman's body because I know I cannot tie up her heart. Only her physical parts can be tied up. Tying up a woman becomes an embrace.

What are the little plastic dinosaurs doing in your universe? What exactly do they represent? Does each one have a specific identity?

NA: I'm a person who needs company all the time. I need to have playmates around me because I often feel lonely. These monsters are my alter ego. They signify my desire to be in my photos, as though they were parts of my body. I love these dinosaurs and I have the simple desire to be with them all the time and to collect them. This is a sexual desire. I want to take photos of the things I love and always be with them.

My balcony's empty right now because these dinosaurs have not returned from my Paris show. They're still stuck in Japanese customs, and I miss them terribly. So now my cat Chiro is also feeling lonesome and pouting a little bit. He's lying on top of Waneen (a large crocodile-object), but he misses them too.

Each dinosaur has a meaning. But it's important for me that they all stay together. Of course each one has its own charm. I even give each of them a name. But the basic reason of my interest in them is that I often feel lonely and would like them to liven up my house. I have lots of flowers for the same reasons. Sentimental loneliness. It relates to the warmth of the womb. I'm a baby and an infant. I can't forget the warmth of the womb. I also like hot springs, which represent a womb of some kind.



Sometimes you paint colours on your black and white photos. Why?

NA: Black and white photos represent death. Taking a photo is like killing the subject. Another way of presentation is the "Arakinema". These are photographs presented with sound and motion. Because monochrome is death, I revive the photos when I re-present them. I want to add sexual desire, passion, and warm body temperature. All this gives me an unconscious desire to paint them. It's not that I want to transform these black and white photos into paintings. I just want to make them closer to the photograph that is in my mind.

I'm not trying to do painting on a photographic ground, just trying to believe in the photos and reveal them by painting. I often choose colours like red and green, and I entitle these pictures "red-green sentimental colours." The layout of my book entitled The End of the Century is entirely made up of re-painted black-and-white photographs. The next book to follow, all in colour, will be the New Century Photography. These two books complete a cycle.

In your series of women in black and white, why do you systematically paint over the genital parts?

NA: First of all, because of censorship since the genital parts must not be seen. In Japan there are many regulations. But I also prefer it that way. Finally, it is better for me to have a few rules. But it's a sign that I like to be mischievous, as though I touched them or placed my sex there. I feel as though I'm swimming back and forth between the colour bank, the bank of our world and the bank of the next world, the world of black and white. Depending on my feelings of the moment, I decide if I should go to the Paradise of black and white, stay in this colour world, or take the same subject by treating it simultaneously in colour or in black and white.

When I'm tired I float on my back and photograph the sky. Paris has the Seine, while Tokyo has two rivers, the Sumidagawa and the Arakawa. But Japan also has a river called the Sanzu no Kawa. It's the river which the Dead must cross on their way to Nirvana.

Time is never specified in your photos. What is your relationship to time?

NA: A photograph takes place only at a certain instant. And this instant is unidentifiable. The instant is the eternal and the eternal is the instant. When the camera shutter is released, that's the eternal. Eternity is achieved by releasing the camera shutter and letting it descend. The action has an immediate connection. It's more an action than an art. I think it is fine to mix photos, regardless of when they were taken. On the other hand, I take photographs with printed dates so that they can be shown in chronological order. The flow of daily occurrence is a story. It is extremely dramatic and interesting. There are various meanings. But it would be, if anything, more interesting to show them in chronological order.

This is why I take photographs as an intimate diary, and always say that they can be left as they were taken without trying to edit them. Editing is done automatically by the life and era we live in. Which means the moment the photos are placed in the order they were taken, God or whoever else - in my case Shasin, the god of photography - will make it work for me. It would be most dramatic if they were placed in the order they were taken unconsciously. That's how most of my photography books are made. I do not need to think of order. For example, if I wish to have a photo of Chiro here or there, I don't need to think. This image appears quite naturally.

Why do you sometimes put dates on photos?

NA: It is making fun of the fact that I hate completion and completion is no good. If a date is printed on a photo, it can never be sold as a masterpiece. It means these photos are merely what happened on a certain day. That is what counts!

Photography is simply about a day, an instant that is extremely wonderful. Nothing could be greater than an intimate journal. Even in literature, the journal stands on a higher level than a novel. The journal represents life, and the date's photography. Or then, it could be up to the photographer to erase the date. Photography is life!

Is that why you've never stopped taking pictures?

NA: As with life itself, one must continue taking photographs continuously. Just as one continues living, for me taking photographs is living.

Which artists, writers or film directors who used the journal format do you feel close to?

NA: I probably feel closest to the Japanese writer Kafu Nagai (1879-1959), who wrote a novel in 1917 called Danchotei Nichijo. He knew that the facts of daily life were very interesting, and it would be even more wonderful to insert fiction into this daily life. Before him, the premise of a journal was to describe the daily reality. He was the first to break this rule by incorporating a few lies, which gives more charm to an intimate journal. In Danchotei Nichijo, everything is false. But it's much more interesting that way.

I also feel close to the Lithuanian film director Jonas Mekas although he doesn't include dates in his work. Maybe his spirituality is superior to mine. But we have a lot of similarities. My "Minowa" is the womb for me and I think that Lithuania is home for Jonas Mekas. My Minowa does not have good wind anymore and is a ruin while his Lithuania, which may have been paradise, is now a ruin. These are circumstances we share. We both are interested in the city or quarter where we were born. Transfers of places, transfers of time. That's what a diary is about. Transfers. But I don't think about that, I just continue to take photos every day. Moving is living. Punctuating the moves is a journal.

What do you think of Gilbert & George, with whom you share the notion of accessibility, of art for everyone? Does this stem from your past in advertising?

NA: When I worked at Dentsu, I did ads for others, but I wanted to advertise for myself. That may be called art. I thought it would be fine enough to show my photos to friends. On the other hand, I always had the desire to be known by more and more people. For example, I would like to hear that the iguanas in the Galapagos wished to see my work. Furthermore, I'd like to have them come to Japan by crossing the ocean and being photographed with me. Then I would take them to Yoshiwara.

How many books have you published so far?

NA: More than 250, I guess. At the beginning, I was tired from the countless unproductive meetings with Japanese publishers, so I published my first books myself by photostating them. I used the black and white Photostat machine at Dentsu. My first book, Xeroxed Photography Book was done that way. When I published Sentimental Journey, no publisher wanted to publish a personal honeymoon in those days. Later on, many publishers published my books, like TASCHEN now. Sometimes I take photos and I want to publish the book immediately, like a premature ejaculation. Sometimes I can't even wait for the three-month deadline after the photo shoot. I would like the book to come out in a month, right after the last picture is shot. That's why I did the book The End of the Century myself, to quench my desire for speed. It's a "live" photography book in which the speed and the heat of the shot are still intact. For other books, it's the publisher who turns up the heat.

Photostating technology has evolved a great deal since the 70s. Do you still make photocopy-books?

NA: Today, copying's much too good, it's no longer of any interest. So I do not make them anymore. A photocopy in the 70s was not just mechanical, it was rough and incomplete. They were copies of my feelings, the 70s emotion and self-emotion. Having used the term "copy", I turned towards the word "reproduction". Because photography is the reproduction of feelings during the actual shooting, or the feelings which I shared with some I met then or even the relationships I had then. It is not the expression, or the willingness to represent the feelings of the subjects I was photographing. Through the subject, I make a copy of myself. Thanks to these subjects, I can make "reproductions". Without them, I couldn't. This may also be the case in life, not only for photos. I need subjects. It can be flowers, the sky, and of course, women. Women make me live. I will continue photographing them. If one day women disappear from the planet, I would hope to die well before it happened.

Do you have any projects that have not materialized and that you wish to undertake in the future?

NA: There is nothing that has not materialized. What happens in the future will be decided by my surroundings. The god(dess) called woman shall guide me.


Taschen - Araki
Hardcover, 34.5 x 50 cm (13.6 x 19.7 in.), 636 pages, $4000.00
The ultimate retrospective collection of Araki's work. Limited edition of 2,500 copies worldwide, each numbered and signed by Araki




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