Art is a mirror. It reflects, actualizes, and sometimes gives advance sight of phenomena which are as yet invisible in real life. This is a way of looking at art that people are now fed up with. The new ethics, which are better known for their post-factum cancelling, toxic inclusivity, rifling through archives in search of the right arguments, and all-remembering Twitter, provide us with the chance to notice the increasing popularity of a new kind of analogy. This is art as a target. Art as something that is attacked. Not criticized – for art, it seems, has learnt to develop antibodies to criticism. But attacked – with the express intention of at least putting the author’s message in a spin but preferably sending the author crashing out of the art scene. These hostile raids, it should be said, are often blatantly one-sided in how they understand and make sense of that against which the barrel of popular opinion is pointed. Categoricality and blinkeredness occur at any end of the spectrum of topicality; they give rise to a blinding radicalism, eclipsing in people’s minds what they knew before: that the kind of art which is capable of making changes – the kind of art which, half a century later (if you’re lucky), is recognized as a work of genius – is often accompanied by ambiguity, contradictoriness, even incongruity.

In this respect Nobuyoshi Araki has been able to earn his reputation as an artist (deliberately, with no relying on ‘luck’ – his path is the opposite of such ordinary magic) in spite of the fact that his art often sparks critical debate and sometimes direct accusations. But what if we remove from our description of Araki’s work the word that is often used of it – ‘controversial’ – and simply look at his photos in their raw state, without the inevitable processing in accordance with the blazing principles of the new ethics? What if instead of trying to ignore the provocative eroticism, we highlight it with sentimentality and tenderness?

Araki (full name: Nobuyoshi Araki) was born in Tokyo in 1940. His father spent most of his life in the historically working-class district of Shitamachi, where he had his own shoe shop in which he sold geta – traditional Japanese handmade strapped sandals. In his free time he was an amateur photographer with a fondness for taking photographs of typical Japanese landscapes such as views of Mount Fuji. The father encouraged the son’s interest in photography; he bought Araki a regular subscription to Sun Photographic Newspaper and to the magazine International Photographic Information. When Araki turned 12, his father gave him one of his cameras – a Baby Pearl 3x4, a folding film camera with a spring mechanism for winding the film on.

In Japan in the 1960s photography was one of the most popular hobbies. The economic boom, especially after the Olympic Games of 1964, and the growth in consumer spending power led, among other things, to ballooning volumes of advertising. Commercial photographs in magazines and on the façades of department stores popularized photography, inspiring people to photograph and be photographed, and the levelling off of prices for cameras made this form of entertainment even more affordable. Armed with his Baby Pearl and pubertal hormones, Araki took his first photos during a school trip – and spent almost his entire reel of film on photographing a classmate to whom he’d taken a fancy. To do his duty as a tourist, he took several shots of the Shinto Temple in Ise as well.

In 1959 Araki entered the film and photography department at Chiba University. During the four years of study that followed he showed particular interest in Italian Neorealist films. However, it was not this period that inspired his first experience as a director: it wasn’t until 1981 that he made his debut with a ‘blue’ film, High School Girl's Fake Diary, a porno novel for Nikkatsu Studio. After graduating, Araki found work at the advertising agency Dentsu but continued taking photographs during his free time, secretly making use of equipment from Dentsu’s inventory. Wandering through the streets of Tokyo, he observed people, trying to achieve unity with them through the camera lens. His first photos to win recognition among professionals were a series of documentary scenes he had observed during his walks. His inspiration mainly came from the work of Ken Domon, a Japanese realist photographer.

After ditching working as a photojournalist for propaganda magazines, Ken Domon (1909-1990) took up socially oriented photography. His goal was to create ‘living’ shots that were completely free of staging or retouching. Of course, recording spontaneous life at each of its moments is possible only outside a photographic studio. Without romanticizing the idea of the monumental photograph, Domon believed in the camera as an objective mechanism with a high degree of critical sensitivity whose function is passionless documentation of reality. For Japan at this time this meant the tragical consequences of the war. Domon took photographs documenting crippled war veterans who had survived the bombing of Hiroshima – a dispossessed, exhausted tribe struggling to organize their life and way of living anew. He also photographed homeless children – kids who remained kids and went on playing, as if nothing had happened, against a background of destruction and wastelands.

Araki’s black-and-white dynamic photos showing children fooling around in a carefree manner were collected as a series under the title ‘Satchin’. In 1964 these photos won him an award from Taiyo magazine. A year later, he continued his work on this series – selecting additional negatives and showing them at what was essentially his first solo exhibition, ‘Satchin and his brother Mabo’.

In 1967 Araki’s father died – the first time Araki had lost a family member at a conscious age. His father’s favourite camera, an Ikonta Super 6, now passed to him as a n heirloom. This first encounter with death left Araki forever traumatized by loss, as we can see from how he studied this phenomenon and depicted it in his photographs. Trying to make sense of his father’s death, Araki recorded his lifeless body with his camera – thus making his personal tragedy part of an eternal study of an event that is an inexorable part of the world order. In an interview Araki once explained his take on death, describing it as an inexorable, primordial element that is simultaneous with life and without which complete happiness and satisfaction are unattainable:

After his father’s death, in 1968, Araki met his future wife, Yoko Aoki, who was working as a features writer at the same advertising agency, Dentsu. Shortly afterwards, Yoko became Araki’s regular model. She was many things to him: a muse for his portraits, a model for still-lifes, his coveted wife, and a co-participant in his photographic acts. And she helped him produce his first book of photographs. Using the Xerox machines at work to reproduce his photograph album, Araki bound 70 copies by hand in the traditional Japanese manner. As a joke, he sent copies of the photo album to friends, art critics, and simply random people whose contacts he poached from the telephone book.

This rough and ready experience of printing a book determined how Araki’s photographs were distributed. He prioritized not exhibitions but photobooks: books created a more intimate, more secluded contact with his photos, allowing the viewer to study the image in depth without coming under pressure from lack of time or the presence of other people at an exhibition. The choice of the photographic monograph as the main way to show his works was also dictated by the situation with ideas of photography in the 1970s. Japan at that time lacked galleries and museums where photographers could exhibit their works. One of the features of Japanese post-war photography was that it treated the photograph as something to be read rather than necessarily to be viewed at an exhibition.

In 1970 Araki created a series of photos in which he took close ups of female genitalia. The photographs were shown to the public at an exhibition called ‘Manifesto of sur-sentimentalism number 2: the truth about Carmen Mari’. The almost anatomical proximity to naked bodies tumbling unashamedly off gallery walls took a sledgehammer to views of what was permissible in photographs and the boundaries between the personal and the public in Japanese photography. Araki photographed the sexual organs from such hypertrophied proximity that their tangibility blew away the bounds imposed on carnal categories. They were recognizable not so much as part of the instrumentarium of sex but as links in one of the most elevated mechanisms in the world. While remaining erotically charged at first impression, these depictions of genitalia were a means by which Araki could convey the ontological basis and the entrance into a hitherto unknown world. Naked bodies in general – in their borderline candid state – became from this moment the main leitmotif in his work. He gave up documentary recording of objective reality in favour of a personal visual language – ‘personal’ photography.

In the Japanese photography community, post-war realism was at this point bounced out by a movement known as ‘subjective photography’, launched by the German photographer Otto Steinert (1915-1978). Steinert’s ideas were taken up and developed by Ikkō Narahara, who saw the photograph as the artist’s ‘personal document’ and its essence as laying bare inner form through meticulous depiction of externals. At the same time, a new group of photographers came into existence – ‘the third wave of depiction (eizo) – who put even more emphasis on manipulating the picture and the process of constructing the image. The photograph’s figurative content was the main means by which to convey the author’s intention and implied freedom to choose all kinds of transformation of the picture – from the composition itself to post-framing.

An extreme form of the mutiny against realism was seen in photographs by Provoke, a group which formed in 1968 with the aim of setting up a small photographic publication. Despite the fact that this publication did not exist for long – it ran to only three issues – it gave rise to a new generation of photographers and laid the foundations for the emergence of ‘personal photography’. Provoke’s photographers created almost-abstract images that confused the viewer. These were cityscapes and compositions involving multiple human figures shown in a deliberately unfocussed, blurred manner, as if each scene was being passed through a metaphysical lens. In terms of technique, such effects were achieved by manipulations of the viewfinder, long exposure, and random use of a flash. Any photographs that failed reduced external reality’s status as the main source for the picture, allowing the photographer to discover this source inside himself. In other words, personal history, events, and philosophy formed the other side of reality – a side that was private, based on the author’s consciousness, and which, according to Provoke, was the only thing that photography was capable of depicting.

Araki made his first study of the possibilities of ‘personal’ photography during his honeymoon with Yoko. After their marriage in July 1971, the newly-weds set off on a honeymoon trip and Araki recorded it with his camera. He documented everything that had significance for him, everything that people usually photograph during a memorable event – walks around the sights of Kyoto, Osaki, Fukuoki, and Nagasaki; moments of silence while travelling by train, in taxis, or on ferries; the couple settling into hotels; etc. He photographed Yoko resting, sleeping, smoking, dressed, naked, groaning during sex, and languid after intensive lovemaking.

Araki erases the border between objectivity and subjectivity, complicating and rethinking the relationship between the photographer and what is being photographed. Penetrating Yoko literally, he destroys this physically perceptible distance, infiltrates the field of the object, and for a moment takes up position inside what he is photographing. Araki as subject, Yoki as object, and the camera as the intermediary in this process fuse together and by simultaneous participation create the documentation of the moment. But Yoko in these photographs is not exclusively ‘the object of the photograph’. In her diary she mentioned that at a certain moment she stopped distinguishing between the camera and Araki. The photography session was no longer a photographic act for her, but something natural. In the photos she does not pose but with all her body tells us what is happening; she is not being staged for the sake of the photo but is a natural and integral part of it – a participant in the process (sometimes literally, if this is documentation of penetration), a coparticipant in the artistic intention.

Shots like this, taken sometimes subconsciously or, on the contrary, with the intention of ‘recording’ a specific moment, are to be found in everyone’s photo gallery on their phones. Which of these photos will you decide to publish on social media, and which will you leave in a well-hidden folder to which you restrict access? The attempt to find precisely the right measure of privacy is what distinguishes photographs in a family album from artistic ‘personal’ photography. The selection made for the latter includes the most candid scenes – which are revealed to the public so that the author’s own experience can be explored through a report containing pictures. Desiring to convey his impressions from the time spent with Yoko, Araki put the photos together into an album called ‘Sentimental Journey’. He did not simply arrange the shots in chronological order, but edited them, finetuning the book’s overall emotionality. To create a more intimate, non-staged atmosphere, he used the technique of offset printing: this gives the photos that ‘banal’ greyish shade which is characteristic of non-professional photography.

Sentimental Journey contains images that have a prophetic, symbolic significance: they foreshadow images shown in Araki’s next photobook on Yoko, the one in which he takes his leave of her – Winter Journey. The sentimentality that first reads as an indication of tender love is in Winter Journey covered with an elegiac web of sadness at the loss of a dear one. The symbols of love are refracted as symbols of loss; their vitality becomes death. Araki binds life, death, and sex with an unbreakable bond: he attaches them to a single figurative thread, which he then uses to link his photos without any visible fastening.

This leitmotif of the ‘threesome’ (the ‘ménage a trois’ is an allusion to another photographic concept. In Araki’s interpretation the production of photographs includes three participants in the act: the camera, the photographer, and the person who is being photographed), which is from this point forwards always to be read in Araki’s photographs, reflects his life philosophy and completes the portrait of his personality. Seen by most people as erotic, images like this are for Araki ‘happy’, full of life, meaning that they are capable of overcoming death and the fears to which death gives rise. This is creation of photographs as exclusion (or, at least, postponement) of death, the inexorable end of what the camera is recording. As a mechanism for overcoming the bodily weakness that is stealing up on us. As a way of extending the feeling of life. Or as a form of Freudian sublimation: proximity as an antidote to death. In some of his diary entries Araki tries out the pseudonym ‘Eroland Barthes’, setting his interpretation of photography against the view taken by Roland Barthes, who wrote that ‘the release of the shutter leads to a small death’.

Araki’s diaries teem with such thoughts. In them he reflects on the death of his mother, Kin, in 1976. Araki photographed her when she was dead and before she had been laid in her coffin. Feeling the loss of her mother as a primeval, irreparable loss, he had an insuperable desire, as a reminder of how she had given him life, to photograph her ‘ontological fundamentals’ – her genitalia and breasts. But a feeling of filial respect for his mother and of guilt before his father compelled him not to follow the impulse of the energy of life, death, and sex at this moment. For Araki photography became a performance that activated his entire physical and mental essence, demanding embodiment so that a particular experience could be felt to the full. Instead of this embodiment, he transferred the camera’s traits to his body, fusing the recording/documentation mechanisms of camera and body together so as to record this moment in his memory forever.

After paying his last respects to his mother, Araki started photographing even more and more, studying the themes of life and death, female and male, and trying to embody them in the style of ‘personal’ photography. He has never stood out for being particularly restrained or methodical in what and how he has photographed. Instead of methodical, painstaking selection of photographic equipment, he prefers feverish photographic voluptuousness; he imposes on himself no restrictions in choice of format, camera, or methods of printing. This lively ‘novice’s mind’ and sense of freedom to experiment are two reasons why the total number of books created by Araki has now swept beyond the 500 mark. What he published in the 1970s, however, gave no indication of how his work would be accepted by the world of art.

In 1976 Araki took part in his first exhibition outside Japan: the public in his homeland was not prepared for photography of such a candid kind. His photographs met with informal criticism from ordinary viewers, as well as formal criticism in the form of warnings, prohibitions on exhibitions, fines, and arrests by the police. Araki ignored these signals from the censors, even when a law was passed on publishing, forbidding photographs of nude people showing pubic hair. By an irony of fate, in the middle of the 1990s, partly as a result of the constant contempt shown for the censor, the authorities relaxed their prohibitions on what kinds of photographs could be shown.

In 1979 Araki brought his works to New York for a group exhibition called ‘Japan: a Self-Portrait’, which brought him his first recognition on the western photography scene. At this moment, though, the non-Japanese audience too perceived Araki’s photographs in a fairly limited context: they took his city photos and portraits of Japanese women – in clothes or naked, bound or unbound – as something exotic, a by-product of western realism reimported from the east. Tokyo Lucky Hole (1983-1985), one of Araki’s photo albums published at this time, potentially had a practical as well as an aesthetic function: it could easily have served as a guide to the sex clubs of Tokyo’s Shinjuku district. Araki was a frequent visitor to establishments in Shinjuku and talked with great passion of his experience of interacting with women through the plywood holes.

That same year, Araki published two books: Pseudo-Reportage, a parody of the documentary style, and Pseudo-Diary, a reflection on the concept of sincerity in personal photography. These albums are especially important: in them Araki used manipulation as his main instrument for constructing authorial intention. He deliberately inserted himself between real facts and authorial intention, mixing and blurring the borders between them. Using photographs taken with a compact camera, he edited the dates by hand and then changed the composition of the photographs to create a false chronology of events.

In the 1990s Araki’s early projects were studied and evaluated for their artistic value. His international renown coincided with Yoko’s death in 1990. Her illness and subsequent death gave him the idea of returning to the material in Sentimental Journey and updating it – by continuing her story. In August 1989 Yoko was hospitalized in an emergency; a diagnosis of ovarian cancer followed shortly after. She had less than six months to live. During this entire period Araki took photographs: he recorded objects frozen in still-lifes, views of the sky from the balcony of their apartment, their cat Chiro, and Yoko in her hospital room, at moments during her illness, and during her last hours of clarity.

Araki put together photographs that studied the trajectory of his wife’s death with shots he had taken during their honeymoon, and constructed the story of another journey – Winter Journey, a journey towards death. He used the structure of the shishōsetsu, a genre of Japanese literature from the Naturalist period which had been used for ‘confessional’ works, where the events in the story entirely reflect events in the author’s life. Paradoxically, it is in this genre, in which it would seem that the primary concern is to convey the truth of life, that we find a preponderance of fantasy mechanisms which, if they do not distort the reality described, at least convey it incompletely or in a form bent to the author’s wishes. Fictive sincerity and aestheticization of the experience described are a frequent side effect of the I-novel; they are what this genre is often criticized for.

In Araki’s view, the shishōsetsu or I-novel is closest of all to photography – given that photography is never a direct copy of reality. Just as Roland Barthes equates the photograph ‘not with a copy of reality, but with an emanation/diffusion/effluence of past reality.’ From Araki’s point of view, photography always exploits a dialogue between facts and interpretations, between truth and falsity, between reality and invention. This is why many of his albums are arranged in a diary format. Like the ‘I-novel’, they give the reader/viewer an almost voyeuristic pleasure, revealing details from the author’s private life but without any attempt to tell the objective truth.

Just as Araki had worked with photos in his ‘Pseudo’ series, so he reconfigured the photographs for Winter Journey, shifting their semantic and narrative accents. He discarded almost all the photos that recounted the adventurous parts of his honeymoon and put the emphasis on Yoko instead. But he did not get rid of the random still-lifes – which in the context of this album remain as allegories of his beloved in her prime. For instance, a butterfly captured fluttering around dried-out field flowers. Or an empty and unmade bed, already cold but still retaining wrinkled traces of Araki and Yoko’s moving bodies. In Winter Journey things, interiors, and weather in the photos are retuned to convey the energy of absence; it is as if they are silently leading us to the culmination of the story.

On 26 January 1990, a day before Yoko’s death, Araki photographed his own shadow on the staircase carrying a bouquet of magnolias to his wife’s hospital bed. Thus he unobtrusively inserted himself into the story, as if reminding us that his role in what was happening was more than mere impersonal documentation. Araki was the author, the narrator, but to the same extent he was a participant in what was being documented. It was his winter journey too. A little later that same day, Araki took his last photo of the couple. In this photo there are no faces, bodies, or even silhouettes of shadows – just the hands of Yoko and Araki. Their hands are the principal and only object in this photograph: a strong and yet at the same time fragile knot. He concentrates and holds back in himself all the pain of this photo – a quiet pain which is interrupted by rare signals on the heart monitor. The unbearable simultaneity of the loss of his wife and his devoted, tender love for her generate an intensity which cannot be contained in the photo’s two-dimensional space; it spreads beyond its limits, and this is a bond which cannot but be felt by the reader/viewer.

After Yoko’s death, Araki’s photographs filled with a dense darkness and an unpleasant lightness of head. Streets, the metro, the funeral, Yoko’s cremation, and the journey home convey Araki’s lost, disoriented state as he painfully lives through his wife’s death. Yoko, who had been the embodiment of Eros for Araki during her life, became Thanatos after her death. He devoted the years that followed in his career to exploring this figurative construct in depth in a series of works titled ‘Erotos’ (1992-1997).

In documenting these fluid metamorphoses on his camera, Araki records the inevitable cycle of alternations between the impulse for life and the impulse for destruction. With his camera he literally establishes the dichotomy between life and death, as if each photo is capable of correcting, making fast, and ripping apart the interaction between these two energies – in order to acquire an endless capability to take delight in the intoxication of Eros while at the same time accepting, without resistance or fear, the inevitability of Thanatos. Perhaps it is thus, through a candid, sometimes shocking, touching demonstration of the poles of love and death – a demonstration unfiltered by any superfluous doubts – that it is possible to be ready for them?