Nobuyoshi Araki

The short-lived Japanese magazine Provoke, founded in 1968, is nowadays recognized as a major contribution to postwar photography in Japan, featuring the country’s finest representatives of protest photography, vanguard fine art and critical theory in only three issues overall. The magazine's goal was to mirror the complexities of Japanese society and its art world of the 1960s, a decade shaped by the country’s first large-scale student protests. The movement yielded a wave of new books show more featuring innovative graphic design combined with photography: serialized imagery, gripping text-image combinations, dynamic cropping and the use of provocatively "poor" materials. The writings and images by Provoke's members―critic Koji Taki, poet Takahiko Okada, photographers Takuma Nakahira, Yakata Takanashi and Daido Moriyama―were suffused with the tactics developed by Japanese protest photographers such as Nobuyoshi Araki, Eikoh Hosoe and Shomei Tomatsu, who pointed at and criticized the mythologies of modern life. Provoke accompanies the first exhibition ever to be held on the magazine and its creators. Illuminating the various uses of photography in Japan at the time, the catalogue focuses on selected projects undertaken between 1960 and 1975 that offer a strongly interpretative account of currents in Japanese art and society at a moment of historical collapse and renewal. show less

Negaeropolis is a series of color photographs featuring subjects consistently found in Araki’s work: nudes, flowers, dolls, and the streets of Tokyo, among other scenes from the artist’s everyday life. In this new body of work, Araki has made photographs of images exactly as they appear on the film negatives. The inverted images, with their complementary hues and orange mask characteristic of negative film, appear simultaneously vibrant and yet somber, expressing how the two sides of show more film- positive and negative- are inextricably linked together, serving as a metaphor for yin and yang and Araki’s own personal view of life and death.

Limited edition of 300 copies. show less

The series consists of around 100 photographs taken around the year 1965, when Araki was working at advertising giant Dentsu. The photos, first shown at an exhibition at Taka Ishii Gallery in February 2011, are presented as a postcard-sized book, hidden in a Fuji photographic paper box replica, the same way Araki discovered his old prints.

“I’ve found a cabinet box, labelled “Theater of Love”. Opening it, there were about 150 prints inside. They must have been taken around ’65, back show more when I was clicking away on an Olympus Pen F, experimenting with thermal development, fooling around with printing and film developing techniques. The photos are a record of me, the women and the life and the places of that era. Seems like I called them “Theater of Love” in those days. But either way — good stuff. Good photos. You can’t get this with digital.”
— Nobuyoshi Araki show less

I bought this out of curiosity more than anything, in one of those bargain bookshops where everything costs only a pound or two. It certainly isn't worth paying full price for.