Minus times minus gives plus. The fall of the shutter creates a small death. Extra marks if you can solve the following problem: what happens when you multiply these statements? What happens when death itself is subjected to the mortifying process of photography? In Araki’s photographs Roland Barthes’ thought about photography as death is given an additional layer of interpretation. Photographing a series of losses, Araki reveals how photography can serve as an antidote to the recorded act of death. He does not use the viewfinder as an escapist portal through which to escape or take refuge from inevitability. He does not observe death through a protective lens that can soften the impact of real events. On the contrary, he deliberately exposes himself to places, scenes, objects, and creatures – including human creatures that grow cold at death’s touch or submissively conserve death’s spirit. When he presses the shutter, Araki does not annihilate death, does not preserve from death the things that fall under his camera lens; he dissolves its primeval terrifying spell, cleanses it of oblivion, so as to illuminate the opposite – love – in its place. Having once seen and debunked death-love, he reveals and manifests this link everywhere and in everything.
Araki does not confine himself to scenes showing burial or cremations – scenes that are taboo from the point of view of privacy. In 1993 he staged an exhibition titled ‘Erotos’ showing an eponymous series of close-up photographs. Here he gets right up close to his ‘models’, subjecting them to almost microscopic enlargement – to exclude even the slightest hint of a distance between him, the author of the photograph, and the object he is photographing. Except, that is, for the few almost physically tangible millimetres that get stuck between his lens and the object's surface.
This kind of extremely close observation of the object blurs the latter’s own character, function, and meaning. Female genitalia, erect penises, nipples – when given the entire space of the photograph, they lose the ostentatious eroticism that they radiate of themselves as an everyday part of the forbidden or concealed. Macro-photography only emphasizes these parts’ anatomical character, makes them carnal in the sense of materially sensible; and yet Araki’s gaze manages to preserve Freudian interpretations in the objects he photographs without stimulating the basic reproductive instinct.
Erotic tension is transformed into poetic sensuality – sensuality that is carnal, sucks you in, hypnotizes with its oozing vitality, and is natural and consequently inexorable. Araki makes what is organic in origin almost abstract, divorced from unambiguous sexually oriented perception. He finds sexuality in something else: an overripe piece of ginger, a flattened orchid flower, an open oyster, a cracked patch of ground, a strawberry bloated with ripeness. Just as Georgia O’Keeffe depicted flowers, discovering, as she drew close to them, the forms of the female genitalia, Araki makes sexually concentrated images of objects which do not convey this energy when the viewer looks at them with a disinterested gaze.
In spite of what is commonly thought, Araki does not concentrate solely on creating objects of female sexuality. Phallic symbols that play on the symbolism of male sexuality are to be detected in his photos of a straightened anthurium with soaring pistil; a bent pipe screwed into a wall; and the neck of a snail crawling into a crevice.
Nature and human organs merge in imagery: Araki constructs the poetic movement of Erotos in such a way that the images become mutually interchangeable at moments of wilting and blossoming, relaxation and tension. These photographs are imbued with love-death in the same way that in traditional Japanese ukiyo-e (浮世絵) the energy of pleasure and mortality and love and sorrow flows simultaneously. Twenty years later, in the 2010s, Erotos was published in a new edition which referred to Araki’s initial intentions. Ten photographs selected from the series, supplemented with Araki’s thoughts, came together in the form of a personal diary that was a modern interpretation of the Japanese literary genre of the pillow book (枕草子).
Initially, the pillow book was not a separate type of work of literature. The first instance of this kind of book dates to the Heian period in the 10th to 11th centuries and is a diary of thoughts and observations kept by Sei Shonagon, a lady in waiting at the court of Princess Teishi. Sei Shonagon set down in her notebook events at court, verses, anecdotes, and her own thoughts, opinions, ideas, and desires. Although she showed these entries to no one and kept her diary to herself, she sometimes used it as a means of conveying a message that could not be expressed explicitly. She would seemingly deliberately put her book down open, leaving on her pillow pages whose message was to be read by a guest, while she herself pretended not to see what was happening – a very Japanese way of expressing her innermost thoughts, avoiding publicity or even the need for spoken speech. In the same way that a pillow book concentrates that which is simultaneously secret and exposed, the private and the public, the serious and the jokey, in Araki’s album books we see a dichotomy based on the co-existence of opposites.
Continuing to be inspired by the richness of the world of flowers, Araki often includes in his photographs flowers or materials that relate to them in some way. From early childhood flowers became established in Araki’s mind as a concentration of the themes of death, love, and beauty. Growing up not far from the Temple of Jokanji, where the ashes of the victims of the fire at Yoshiwara (Tokyo’s old redlight district) are kept, he often saw scatterings of cut flowers that people brought to the graves. In the wilting flowers he sensed a beauty which had only just but been cut short but still persisted, and in the opening buds he had a presentiment of their imminent death. He recorded the various stages of the development of the flower, remembering and accepting that each state he recorded was evanescent and so even more beautiful.
Since 1973, flowers have been the main object of Araki's visual research. They supplement the setting of his still-lifes or are used as props. They are to be found in what are, without exaggeration, the most unexpected places – for instance, thrust into the perineum of a suspended girl. With their buds they cover up or even replace the female genitalia. Or in the form of the slender tree trunks to which Araki ties up his models they become a continuation of the girls’ curving bodies.
Araki created this ‘floral rondeau’ in his eponymous series of photographs from 1997 (Flower Rondeau). What defines the rondeau (from the French word for ‘round’) as a poetic genre is its refrain-based, repetitive structure. The poem concludes with a placid acceptance of pain and loss in a line containing the phrase ‘c'est la vie’. Araki constructs this form with the help of numerous photographs of flowers that are in their fullest bloom. With flowers, as with his human models, Araki prefers working as close as he can get. He infiltrates the plants’ insides, penetrates the buds with his camera, and records and describes with anatomical obsession every accumulation of pollen on the stamens, every bend of the pistils. These are scenes of ‘floral coitus’.
For all the diversity of species which Araki records, his close-ups do not come across as a botanical atlas. This is because he photographs his subjects with the intention of revealing simultaneously their natural and unearthly essences, their delicacy and confidence, spirituality and carnality, eroticism and imminent extinction. Appreciating their beauty, he also appreciates this beauty’s frailty, which is why this series includes depictions of flowers ‘one moment afterwards’ – with barely conspicuous traces of death in the fatigue-bent buds and cracked petals. Just as the poetry of the rondeau achieves reconciliation with life and death, so the flowers in Araki’s photographs ooze a subtle melancholy at the ephemerality of their own beauty.
Submissively moving along their predetermined life path, flowers embody the principle of mono-no aware (物の哀れ) — ‘the sorrowful charm of things’ – that imbues everything around us. The series of Polaroids with flowers made by Araki in 2006-2009 set out to once again capture this fleeting beauty which nothing can protect against death. Paradoxically, however, this instant-photo technology merely intensifies the feeling that the natural course of things cannot be stopped – all we can do is observe them as they slip delicately away.
Another attempt to immortalize flowers at the apogee of their vital forces is to be seen in the series Painting Flowers. In 2004 Araki photographed flower buds after covering them in acrylic inks made by Liquitex. The semi-transparent flows of acrylic act on the flowers like filters, reinforcing the characteristics that are most prevalent in each particular flower. The inks reveal the intensity of the red in the fresh rosebuds that are so hungry for life – and give succulence and elasticity to the green stems that are at every moment trying to stretch even higher. And at the same time the glossy coating on the wilting plants makes them seem embalmed, frozen in the pose of Thanatos.
Some of the flowers photographed by Araki may be seen through the prism of hanakotoba (花言葉), the Japanese language of flowers. Although Araki himself has never used this word to describe his floral series, the link between the flowers he chooses for his photos and their sexual connotations is unlikely to be accidental. Cactus flowers, anthuriums, mistletoe branches, and red roses and camelias that symbolize passion, love on the verge of death, lust, and sex compete in Araki’s photograph with orchids, lilies, and camelias embodying purity, innocence, and virgin beauty.
Historically, floriography or the language of flowers was a form of wordless communication – coded messages were sent by spiking a bouquet with flowers that were a symbol of something. Japan proposed its own form of this secret language, adding to it the Buddhist practices of attention to detail and appreciation of the ephemerality of things. One way in which this tradition was expressed was the making of floral compositions, which in Japan are better known as ikebana (生け花 — meaning ‘to preserve or install flowers alive’) or kado (華道 — meaning ‘way of flowers’). The emergence of this practice dates to the Heian period (the 8th to the 12th centuries), when floral compositions were created for altar offerings. Later, they began to be used for decorating tokonomas (recessed spaces) in the traditional Japanese house. Ikebana is not simply what a florist does in his/her free time: it has always been a special artistic discipline, with strict criteria and rules. The main objective in ikebana in everything from the arrangement of the flowers to the choice of vase has always been to get the flowers to live longer.
Inspired by the silent symbolism of floral compositions, Araki puts together his own variants of ikebana. His botanical arrangements are more like surrealistic tabletop versions of gardens of Eden, with scenes of the original fall from grace tirelessly playing out in their midst. Araki includes in his bouquets the most obscure flowers and plants, creating a kind of paradisal jungle brimming with an abundance of life. The bearers of meaning in his ikebana are figures of naked girls with accentuated forms and traditional geisha make up – exactly like the collector’s toys that otakus obsess over. The miniature dolls are deprived of movement, tied up, and subjected to extravagant posing and coitus with male figures or other strange inhabitants of the jungle. Plastic Godzilla-like dinosaurs, lizards, and other reptiles that fulfil the role of corrupting, snake-seducers here constantly intervene in the sexual act, deepening the strange, exotic quality of what is happening. In Monstrous Palace (2015-2018), a work which could well have been generated by AI, people, monsters, and flowers merge in a pulsating, chaotic, flow of temptations and dangers, pleasure and pain, beauty and ugliness, life and death.
As a generalized image of mythical, strange creatures, monsters are another important detail in photographs by Araki. He borrows them from the Japanese cinematographic genre of tokusatsu, in which the subject is constructed around a kaiju (怪獣 — ‘strange animal’). In its turn, kaiju alludes to the tradition of animism which existed in Japanese engravings from the Edo period – for instance, in works by Katsushika Hokusai. (It is no accident that Araki calls himself ‘photo-mad Old Man A’, as if comparing the comprehensiveness of references, themes, and effusiveness of his creative practice with the quantity of engravings created by Hokusai, ‘the old man who was mad about drawing’.
In films kaiju are often antagonists, embodiments of absolute evil, or at any rate, cannon fodder, that which has to be destroyed in order to defend oneself, but Araki’s monsters are associated with insuperable desire – both erotic and the desire for power or control. Since the source of the desire in the photographs is often the author himself, Araki must have a symbolic object in which his alter ego can live. By putting dinosaur figures in his pictures, Araki is able to be present on the other side of the camera without this presence being physical. His spirit – predatory but also kind of cautious, lustful but playful, terrifying but harmless – surrounds the models tied up with ropes; it cranks up an uneasy atmosphere of oppression but in fact keeps death away.
Araki’s tying up of models is often perceived as a sexually objectifying act that borders on violence. That people take this point of view is understandable: few are capable of reading in the bodies compressed by tight knots anything other than coercive restriction of freedom. However, this understanding of the binding in Araki’s works is only part of the story. Kinbaku (緊縛 —‘tight binding’, better known in Western culture as shibari, is rooted in the Japanese martial art of hojojutsu (捕縄術 — ‘repression using rope’). Traditionally, ropes of jute or hemp fibre were used to tie up captives or prisoners, not just to restrain the victim but also as a punitive measure, to cause pain or loss of feeling. Later, at the end of the Edo period (the 16th to 18th centuries), kinbaku was studied by the artist Seiu Ito. He tied up his models, photographed them, and used the images as inspiration for his pictures. Scenes of tying up began to be depicted in erotic engravings called shungas (春画 — ‘pictures of spring’) by other artists, and also appeared in performances in kabuki theatre. Bondage’s origin as an instrument of torture was gradually supplemented with sexualised context, during the course of which kinbaku acquired the meaning of ‘the beauty of tight binding, of rigid slavery.’
We may suppose that Araki mastered the art of kinbaku when he was a teenager. In the 1950s photographs of naked tying up were extensively published in the erotic magazines Kitan Club and Yomikiri Romance, and in the 1960s ‘rope-slavery’ skills were taught live on SM shows on TV. Kinbaku became popular as a BDSM practice combining pain and ecstasy in a single process. The inequality of power that exists between the nawashi, the bondage master, and the person who is being tied up, is a source of sexual pleasure which in kinbaku is possible only when there is mutual consent. Reaching one’s ‘destination’ is not a necessary part of this practice: the pleasure lasts for the duration of the ‘journey’. This is largely due to the fact that the rope is perceived as a continuation of the arms of the nawashi, who uses it to ‘interact’ with the person being tied up.
This same idea is to be seen in Araki’s photos: like a rope snake, he clasps the models’ bodies fast and fixes them in certain poses. In the absence of other props, Araki’s presence in the picture pulsates in the knots, jutes, and the swollen folds of the models’ bodies. He is simultaneously a flexible rope and a rigid wire; he wraps himself around with his embrace and binds by restraining. He is the only person and the only thing exercising control over the process of the binding, over the composition of the picture, over the recording of beauty. In binding a woman, Araki is aware that he is restraining only her physical dimension, and at the same time with each new picture he makes an attempt to restrain something else. It is as if each time he presses the shutter, he is trying to save his new prey from the captivity of ‘love-death’ – so great is his fear that the fate of his dead wife will be repeated. Tying up becomes a restraining or stopping of the love-death link, a fantasy-fetishist instrument of control and fixation of a position-state – in order to acquire the possibility of eternal pleasure and to prevent death from interrupting this act.