Araki has always attracted controversy, and this show is no exception. Made up of more than 4,000 images, Self. Life. Death - both the exhibition and the book that accompanies it - tracks the 40-year career of Japan’s most celebrated photographer. In the west Araki is notorious for his erotic or pornographic photographs, but at home in Japan he is also known as a sensitive documentarist and a brilliant portraitist. His more than 300 books range from Tokyo Lucky Hole, which reveals the hidden decadence of a society at the peak of economic success, to the moving Sentimental Journey/Winter Journey, which records his honeymoon in 1971 and then the death of his wife Yoko in 1990. The Barbican exhibition displays a cross-section of Araki’s work, but while Self. Life. Death makes it clear there is more to Araki than pornography, it is sex that drives him. And it is the sex that will draw in the crowds.
At lunch he proved his voracious photographic appetite by taking pictures during the meal. “The desire for eating, sexual desire and the desire to take photos are the three things that are important to me,” he says with one eye to the camera. Araki likes to play with immature sexual innuendo: a lump of cod roe looking like a penis, an oyster mistaken for a vagina. As the shutter clicks, the photographer laughs. “When people have started eating and food gets messy on the plate, that is the moment I like to photograph.” His enthusiastic approach to the violated plate of food is that of the practised voyeur. This is “food porn” taken up a notch and his photos of food are among the most sensual in the exhibition. In Araki’s world even the mundane becomes eroticised.
In one room at the Barbican more than 3,000 Polaroids are stuck to the wall. It is a veritable orgy of food and sex, and the pornographic connotations of the Polaroid adds to the sense of debauchery. Hundreds of images of Japanese women in various sexual poses are mixed with images of the sky, sliced chilli cod roe, and “onsen tamago” - eggs poached in a volcanic hot spring. The women are “passers by”, his “accidental lovers”, he calls them. “Some are models I met through work. Some are housewives. But nevertheless, once photographed, they all become ‘Araki’s lovers’.” He’s lying again, blurring the truth.
In the press advertising for the exhibition, the Barbican uses a portrait of a geisha-like woman and labels Araki “Japan’s most controversial photographer”. But capitalising on stereotypes about Japan and Araki’s sexualised images will do little to dispel orientalist views of the sexually alluring and passive oriental woman. “This is my personal work, in my own world, women are like this,” he says. And although his work puts women in sexually compromising situations, he is often approached by volunteers to be photographed.
In a documentary, Arakimentari, that accompanies the exhibition we are able to see one of his kinbaku bondage photos being shot. A young woman in a kimono is bound and hangs by ropes from the ceiling. Her legs are apart and her clothes are open to reveal she is naked underneath. The striking thing about this scene, and the interview with the model afterwards, is the sense of collaboration and even fun that occurs during the shoot. It is the same when we see him shooting his housewives series. While the final images may be attacked as misogynistic, the models in Araki’s work are all willing participants in the creation of these images.
“Araki: Self. Life. Death” runs at the Barbican Art Gallery until January 22. “Nobuyoshi Araki: Self. Life. Death” is published by Phaidon (£39.95).
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