Nobuyoshi Araki
[Photographer, b. 1940, Tokyo, lives in Tokyo.]
Photography is copying.
I’ve been taking photographs since I came into this world. I was no sooner out of my mother’s womb, than I turned around and photographed her sex.
I like photography so I like all the photographers before me, even if they’re lousy or not my style.
When you hold on to something that moves, that is a kind of death. The camera, the photographic image have always called forth the idea of death. And I think about death when I photograph, as you can see in the pictures. That may be an oriental, Buddhist concept.
A lot of my pictures are foreplay but the best ones are orgasms.
I have nothing to say. There's no particular message in my photos. The messages come from my subjects, men or women. The subjects will convey what there is to say. I have things to photograph, so I've nothing to express. Right now, I’m showing my enjoyment of life rather than the sadness of death. Some people I know say that life is sad. But today I think the opposite. Death is sadder.
Photography has always been associated with death. Reality is colorful, yet early photography always took the color out of reality and made it black-and-white. Color is life; black-and-white is death. There was a ghost hidden in the invention of photography.
Actually, these days my work is focusing on Japanese people’s faces. I recently photographed a thousand faces in Osaka and I would like to do the same in every prefecture. This project might take me ten years. There is something that I am looking for by taking these photos. The human face represents all aspects of sexuality and each one expresses it a bit differently.
