Naked city

ArtForum, Jan, 1995 by Nan Goldin

IN 1992, THE EDITORS OF THE JAPANESE MAGAZINE DEJA-VU INVITED ME TO TOKYO TO MEET NOBUYOSHI ARAKI. I'D ALREADY HEARD ABOUT THIS WILD MAN OF JAPANESE PHOTOGRAPHY, AND OF HIS DIARISTIC, INTENSELY SEXUAL WORK. ARAKI HAD PROCURED A COPY OF MY BALLAD OF SEXUAL DEPENDENCY, THOUGH IT'S UNAVAILABLE IN JAPAN DUE TO STRINGENT CENSORSHIP LAWS. I WAS ASTOUNDED TO FIND A MAN ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE PLANET WHO WAS WORKING THE SAME OBSESSIONS I WAS.

WE MET FOR THE FIRST TIME AT DUG, HIS REGULAR JAZZ BAR IN SHINJUKU, WHERE HE PRESENTED ME WITH A BOTTLE OF I. W. HARPER BOURBON (HIS FAVORITE DRINK) WITH MY NAME ON IT. NOW IT'S STORED THERE NEXT TO ROBERT FRANK'S. HE SHOWED ME HIS TOKYO THAT NIGHT; WE WENT TO THE BACK-ALLEY BARS ON THE GOLDEN GAI, BARS THAT USED TO BE BROTHELS, AND THAT SEAT ABOUT SIX PEOPLE EACH. IT'S SAID THAT NO ONE CAN REALLY TRANSLATE ARAKI BECAUSE HE SPEAKS IN PUNS AND JOKES.

Most Japanese women are too shy to translate his endless sexual allusions, so when the women in his entourage blushed furiously, I'd say "Is he talking about his penis again?"

Araki is a superstar in Japan. You realize this if you chart his wake through the streets of Shinjuku--young girls screeching, yakuza gangsters pointing, salary men stopping dead in their tracks. No photographer in the West has this kind of public visibility. The people of Tokyo love Araki--he's one of their own, a homeboy, and he loves them back: his work has been one long poem to his city of birth and of choice.

Araki has published almost a hundred books. He once told me he'd spent years as a commercial photographer making other people famous, and now he's an artist making himself famous. Though he's long been celebrated in Japan, his work has only recently been exported to the West, through the word of mouth of Western artists like Robert Frank, Jim Jarmusch, and myself. In the past few years he's had retrospectives in Graz, Austria, and in Frankfurt, and gallery shows in London, Cologne, and New York.

As Araki's work starts to spread, I'm sure some will find it misogynist. I don't, but perhaps that's because I know the man: I've seen and known his generosity and curiosity about people and about life, his love for and appreciation of women, his naughty-boy attitude toward what is taboo or revered or overserious. Much of his recurring imagery--girls in school uniforms, girls in complicated rope tricks, girls in love hotels--is popular in Japanese pornography; but Araki crosses the line between pornography and art. His work is colored by love, and meant as homage--to women and to beauty and to his own desires. In Japan, where women's roles are in a period of flux and the idea of female identity in the Western sense is a new one, many young women find Araki's images liberating. To show their bodies, to flaunt their sexuality, feels to them like freedom; teenagers flock to Araki to be photographed by him.

Since I first met Araki we've collaborated occasionally, and recently we published a book together, Tokyo Love. I believe he has attained greatness a number of times--in Araki's Tokyo Erotomania Diary, and in Sentimental na Tabi/Fuyu no Tabi (Sentimental journey/winter journey, 1991), which he calls his "purest" book, a deeply moving record of his honeymoon with his wife, Yoko, in 1971, and then of her death from cancer in 1990. Araki is a driven man. On the day of our interview he'd done a long shoot at a rented studio in the afternoon. As usual, he had an entourage in tow, and we all headed for a Spanish restaurant to talk over squid-ink pasta eaten with chopsticks. Then we returned to the studio, where Araki held a workshop on photographing the female nude. Some of Tokyo's leading directors, designers, editors, and actors were in attendance, and he kept them going till midnight.

NAN GOLDIN: One of the things Westerners feel about Japan is that it's a very conformist society--as in that Japanese proverb, "The nail that sticks out must get hammered down." Are you a nail sticking out?

NOBUYOSHI ARAKI: No, I'm not the nail that sticks out, probably because of my in-born vitue. I'm more like a naughty boy.

NG: In the text you wrote for our book together, Tokyo Love, you say you now only want to photograph happiness.

NA: Yes, but happiness always contains a mixture of something like unhappiness. When I photograph unhappiness I only capture unhappiness, but when I photograph happiness, life, death, and everything else comes through. Unhappiness seems grave and heavy; happiness is light, but happiness has its own heaviness, a looming sense of death.

NG: Why do you always say that photography itself has a smell of death?

NA: To make what is dynamic static is a kind of death. The camera itself, the photograph itself, calls up death. Also, I think about death when I photograph, which comes out in the print. Perhaps that's an Oriental, Buddhist perception. To me, photography is an act in which my "self" is pulled out via the subject. Photography was destined to be involved with death. Reality is in color, but at its beginnings photography always discolored reality and turned it into black and white. Color is life, black and white is death. A ghost was hiding in the invention of photography.