Nobuyoshi Araki

Nobuyoshi Araki was born in 1940 in Minowa, in central Tokyo, where he still lives and works today. At the age of six, his father gave him a camera, and from that moment on, photography became an obsession for him. He is considered one of the most prolific artists of all time. Fascinated by the naked female body, female genitalia, sex, and death, throughout his career he has explored the movements and depths of Eros—a theme, that of eroticism, which he began addressing in the early 1970s and which gained prominence with his reportage on Tokyo’s red-light district, Kabukicho, in the 1980s.

Within the Giuseppe Iannaccone Collection, there are two photographs: The first, Tokyo Comedy (1997–2008), is part of a series that reflects Tokyo's vital chaos, mixing humor and social critique. In the image, the model is tied using the traditional Japanese bondage art of shibari, surrounded by small fake animals. The second work, Mythology (2001–2008), is part of the eponymous series dedicated to the memory of his wife Yoko, who passed away in 1990. The images combine female bodies and symbolic objects (dolls, sake, flowers...) that evoke the dualism between Eros and Thanatos.

In a 2007 interview with Jérôme Sans, Nobuyoshi said:

“Women contain all the fascination of life within themselves. They possess all the essential attributes: beauty, ugliness, obscenity, purity... far more than nature itself. […] In a woman, there is both the bud and the bloom. […] Women teach you much more about the world than reading Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine. Whether it’s your wife, a one-night stand, or a prostitute, women show you how the world turns. After all, I stopped reading when I finished elementary school. I built my life through knowing women.”