NOBUYOSHI ARAKI : CRAZY OLD MAN A

Large hardback collection of polaroid images from Araki's recent exhibition at Impossible Space, Beijing.

“Amazing things are always around us, whether they are real or not. I always photograph ordinary things, because photographs are the record of living things.” Araki, a key iconoclast of great talent, is one of the most prolific photographers of his time. Having already published several hundreds of books and thousands of pictures, Araki has indeed for over fifty years revolutionized the world of photography. His outlook is both sentimental and filled with energy, whereby the Erotos (a combination of Eros and Thanatos) appears in every image. Araki is photography. His practice lies at the heart of his existence, the camera being an extension of his own self. Araki offers us a peculiarly dark body of work. The photographs in Crazy Old Man A follow a dynamic in which the inanimate becomes alive and the living appears dead. Instant films, framed in black and white, alternate here. These appeal to Araki in the way they spark memories of ancestors’ portraits. One may recognize in them the artists’ visual vocabulary -naked women, bondage, suggestive flowers, various toys as well as abstract compositions he had painted.

Nobuyoshi Araki'sCrazy Old Man Acontains a series of polaroid snapshots exhibited at the Impossible Space Beijing in 2014. With text included in both Japanese, English and French the polaroid images capture figures and objects which resonate with themes familiar with Araki's works.The female subject returns again within this collection of polaroids, stark and portrayed in a more darker tone, seen through the different layers created in areas where the emulsion has eroded; leaving corners and areas blocked out by black and brown effects. Here the images of Araki's fascination with Kinbaku, and other familiar scenes of flowers modeled with toys signifying both male and female genitalia are coupled with the use of the polaroid medium. The resulting effect is a beautiful yet dark collection of images reflecting important themes within the artist's visual language, the endless cycle of life and death, female eroticism and of his love for his birth place Tokyo, Japan.