Nobuyoshi Araki

Nobuyoshi Araki (b. 1940, Tokyo) is Japan's most prolific and most provocative photographer, with more than five hundred photobooks to his name. Since Sentimental Journey (1971) — the intimate chronicle of his honeymoon with his wife Yoko, still regarded as a landmark of Japanese photography — Araki has fused diary and art, recording Tokyo's streets, skies, flowers, and intimacies with an unmatched compulsion. His work moves between tenderness and transgression: lyrical still lifes of flowers on one page, the charged rope imagery of kinbaku on the next. Celebrated and contested in equal measure, Araki has been exhibited at major institutions across Europe, America, and Asia, and his prints are held in leading photography collections worldwide.