A young woman with her legs spread wide; buttoned-up dressed workers on a city street. Contrasting photos like these of intensely private scenes, and snapshots of nameless passers-by are Nobuyoshi Araki’s early commentary on the heterogeneity of Japanese society, calling the moral responsibility of its members into question. This book combines Araki’s Tokyo series from his early works with a selection of his recent Polaroid collages and newly developed slide shows — all of them exploring the contradictions between anonymity and intimacy, the public and private sphere, reality and dream.

The legendary Araki is one of the most influential and widely discussed artists today, one who deals with nakedness, sexuality and the body in a radical and realistic way. Through an extreme emotional and physical closeness with his subjects, he becomes not only part of their lives but plays a central role in his own photos, thus transcending voyeurism. Together with Nan Goldin, Larry Clark and Boris Mikhailov, Araki is considered one of the pioneers of intimate subjective photography.

Art is all about doing what you shouldn’t. Nobuyoshi Araki 

About the Author:

Born in Tokyo in 1940, Nobuyoshi Araki worked in advertising after completing his studies in photography and film at Chiba University in Tokyo; he devoted himself exclusively to photography from the mid-1960s. Araki’s oeuvre spans erotic portraits of women, artificial still lifes, images of plants, documentary-style depictions of everyday life, architectural photography, as well as diaristic photos of himself and his deceased wife Yoko. He has published around 400 books, shown in many international exhibitions, and his work is part of important collections worldwide. Araki lives and works in Tokyo.

Red petals and rope binding. The ultimate Araki collection

Decades’ worth of images have been distilled down to 568 pages of photographs in this ultimate retrospective collection of Nobuyoshi Araki's work, selected by the artist himself.

First published as a limited edition and now available as a standard TASCHEN edition, the curation delves deep into Araki's best-known imagery: Tokyo street scenes; faces and foods; colorful, sensual flowers; female genitalia; and the Japanese art of kinbaku, or bondage. As girls lay bound but defiant and glistening petals assume suggestive shapes, Araki plays constantly with patterns of subjugation and emancipation, death and desire and with the slippage between serene image and shock.

Describing his bondage photographs as a'a collaboration between the subject and the photographer’, Araki seeks to come closer to his female subjects through photography, emphasizing the role of spoken conversation between himself and the model. In his native Japan, he has attained cult status for many women who feel liberated by his readiness to photograph the expression of their desire.

About the Author:

Nobuyoshi Araki was born in Tokyo in 1940. Given a camera by his father at the ripe age of twelve, Araki has been taking pictures ever since. He studied photography and film at Chiba University and went into commercial photography soon after graduating. In 1970 he created his famous Xeroxed Photo Albums, which he produced in limited editions and sent to friends, art critics, and people selected randomly from the telephone book. Over the years, his bold, unabashed photographs of his private life have been the object of a great deal of controversy and censorship (especially in his native Japan), a fact that has not fazed the artist nor diminished his influence. To date, Araki has published over 400 books of his work.

Welcome to the era of the no-panties coffee shop. Tokyo "entertainment centers" in the early 1980s photographed by Araki

It started in 1978 with an ordinary coffee shop near Kyoto whose waitresses famously wore no panties under their miniskirts and see-through pantyhose. As word began to spread, similar establishments popped up across the country. Men lined up outside these cafés waiting to pay three times the usual price for coffee served by a panty-free young woman, hoping to catch a fortuitous glimpse. Within a few years, a new craze took hold: the no-panties "massage" parlor. Competition for customers led these new types of businesses to offer an increasingly bizarre range of services: fondling clients through holes in coffins whilst they lie naked inside playing dead, interiors catering to commuter-train fetishists, young virgin role-playing, etc. Amongst these many destinations was a Tokyo club called Lucky Hole. Here, the premise was ridiculously simple: clients stood on one side of a plywood partition, a hostess on the other; in between, them was simply a hole big enough for a certain part of the male anatomy to pass through.

About the Author:

Nobuyoshi Araki was a frequent visitor to the sex clubs of Tokyo’s Shinjuku neighbourhood, and he photographed them profusely until the golden age of Japan’s sex industry came to a screeching halt in February 1985, with the enactment of the New Amusement Business Control and Improvement Act. In over 800 photos, Tokyo Lucky Hole documents the free-for-all spirit of those clubs via Araki’s lens.

About the series:

Bibliotheca Universalis — Compact cultural companions celebrating the eclectic TASCHEN universe at an unbeatable, democratic price!

Since we started our work as cultural archaeologists in 1980, TASCHEN has become synonymous with accessible, open-minded publishing. Bibliotheca Universalis brings together more than 100 of our all-time favourite titles in a neat new format so you can curate your own affordable library of art, anthropology, and aphrodisia.

Bookworm’s delight — never bore, always excite!

The subject is Japanese photographer Araki, a man who talks about life through photographs. His powerful oeuvre, decades' worth of images, has been pared down to 540 pages of photographs which tell the story of Araki and comprise the ultimate retrospective collection of his work.

Known best for his intimate, snapshot-style images of women often tied up with ropes (kinbaku, Japanese rope-tying art) and of colorful, sensual flowers, Araki is an artist who reacts strongly to his emotions and uses photography to experience them more fully. Obsessed with women, Araki seeks to come closer to them through photography, using ropes like an embrace and the click of the shutter like a kiss. His work is at once shocking and mysteriously tender; a deeply personal artist, Araki is not afraid of his emotions nor of showing them to the world.

About the Author:

Nobuyoshi Araki was born in Tokyo in 1940. Given a camera by his father at the ripe age of twelve, Araki has been taking pictures ever since. He studied photography and film at Chiba University and went into commercial photography soon after graduating. In 1970 he created his famous Xeroxed Photo Albums, which he produced in limited editions and sent to friends, art critics, and people selected randomly from the telephone book. Over the years, his bold, unabashed photographs of his private life have been the object of a great deal of controversy and censorship (especially in his native Japan), a fact that has not fazed the artist nor diminished his influence. To date, Araki has published over 400 books of his work.

Born in 1940, Nobuyoshi Araki is arguably Japan’s greatest living photographer, and certainly its most controversial. His inexhaustible creative energy is attested to by the more than 300 books he has published in the last four decades, while his work, which often challenges social taboos surrounding sex and death, has drawn critical attention both at home and abroad. In 1971 Araki privately published Sentimental Journey, an intimate account of his honeymoon with his wife Yoko. In the Preface to this book, Araki declared that his ‘point of departure as a photographer was love ... and the idea of an I-novel [a form of Japanese fiction written autobiographically and in the first person]’. With this statement, Araki established the genre of ‘I-photography’, in which his own life and feelings became the central subject of his work. The idea was to have a great impact on a new generation of Japanese photographers, especially in the 1990s. By 1990, the year of Yoko’s death, Araki had produced an immense body of work. Through his photographs he has created his own universe, where the themes of sex, life and death are closely intertwined. Tokyo, Araki’s home city, often plays a leitmotif in his work, while his rich visual vocabulary is drawn from the erotic Shunga of the Eda period (1600–1867) as well as the glossy imagery of the new commercial culture.

Through his innovative approach to his medium – sometimes combining painting, drawing and film – Araki has become an influential figure in contemporary art, beyond the field of photography. This major publication provides the most comprehensive overview yet of Araki’s prolific 40-year career. Araki’s key series of works are included alongside many rare and previously unpublished photographs. Featuring an interview and essays by writers from Japan and Europe, this book examines Araki from a broad range of perspectives and gives a cultural context to his work. Also included are a large selection of Araki’s writings, translated into English for the first time, as well as complete illustrated and annotated bibliography of his own books. Reflecting Araki’s principle of ‘I-photography’, the book is divided into three sections that follow the main recurring themes in his work: Self, Life and Death.