Synopses & Reviews
"I was no sooner out of my mother's womb, than I turned around and photographed her sex!"
The first title in our new TASCHEN limited series is Araki, an enormous and highly unique book with a print run of only 2,500 copies. The subject is Japanese photographer Araki, a man who talks about life through photographs. His powerful oeuvre, decades' worth of images, has been pared down to about 1,000 photographs which tell the story of Araki and comprise the ultimate retrospective collection of his work.
Known best for his intimate snapshot-style images of women often tied up with ropes (kinbaku, Japanese rope-tying art) and of colorful, sensual flowers, Araki is an artist who reacts strongly to his emotions and uses photography to experience them more fully. Obsessed with women, Araki seeks to come closer to them through photography, using ropes like an embrace and the click of the shutter like a kiss.
His work is at once shocking and mysteriously tender; a deeply personal artist, Araki is not afraid of his emotions nor of showing them to the world. He said of this collaboration with TASCHEN: "This book will expose everything of myself. This is my dying will of my sixty years. It is a testament which reads: photography is love and death."