Nobuyoshi Araki has spent most of his life photographing what was closest to him. His pictures move between love, sex, loss, flowers, city streets, and ordinary moments at home, turning everyday life into a long personal diary.
«Photography is a diary. Every photograph is a part of my life».
Born in Tokyo in 1940, Araki began his career in advertising before focusing on his own work. In 1971, he published Sentimental Journey, a book made during his honeymoon with his wife, Yoko. Instead of creating a traditional photo project, he documented their life together as it happened.
After Yoko died in 1990, photography became a way for Araki to deal with grief. He published Winter Journey, showing her final days and the period after her death. From that point on, themes of memory, absence, and mortality appeared throughout much of his work.
Araki's relationship with Yoko was not simply an intimate subject for his camera. He photographed her during sex, naked, and later while she was seriously ill, turning parts of their private life into public images. Years later, Araki admitted that he may have related to Yoko more as a photographer than as a husband. He also acknowledged that his way of photographing her caused her suffering. Their relationship was deeply entangled with his work, and the camera was never simply an observer. It was part of their marriage.
One of those projects was Death Reality (1997). Rather than showing death directly, Araki photographed flowers, empty rooms, hospital spaces, and everyday objects. The series reflects on how loss gradually becomes part of daily life and how ordinary things can carry memories of people who are gone.
Alongside these deeply personal projects, Araki became internationally known for photographs exploring sexuality and the Japanese practice of kinbaku, or rope bondage. These images made him one of Japan's most talked-about photographers. Some saw them as a study of intimacy and desire, while others criticized the way women were portrayed. The debate has remained part of his career for decades.
«Life and death exist together. Photography can never separate them».
Araki has never separated these different subjects. Flowers, portraits, city streets, erotic photographs, and the Tokyo sky all appear throughout his books, often side by side. For him, they are all connected by the same cycle of life, love, and death.
Over the years, he has published hundreds of photobooks, treating each one as a complete work rather than simply a collection of pictures. Books have always been central to the way he tells stories.
Even after losing much of the vision in one eye in 2013, Araki continued photographing almost every day. His later work became more restrained, focusing on familiar places and small moments that had always interested him.
Whether he is photographing a person, a flower, or the sky above Tokyo, Araki is always documenting his own life. His photographs are less about explaining Japan than about recording the experiences, emotions, and memories that shaped his world.