Araki: Impossible Love: Vintage Photographs

This book combines Araki’s early Tokyo series 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.

Araki is one of the most influential and widely discussed artists today, legendary for his radical and realistic treatment of nudity, sexuality and the body. Together with Nan Goldin, Larry Clark and Boris Mikhailov, Araki is considered one of the pioneers of intimate subjective photography.

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, and 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.