Nobuyoshi Araki – Sentimental Journey 1971–2017
Exhibition catalogue published by the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum in July 2017, accompanying the retrospective ARAKI Nobuyoshi: Sentimental Journey 1971–2017– (25 July – 24 September 2017). The volume brings together 402 photographs across 288 pages, tracing the arc of Araki's concept of the "I-Photograph" from the self-published Sentimental Journey of 1971 through to 2017.
Publication and Exhibition Context
The catalogue is supervised by the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, edited by Hiromi Kitazawa, and designed by Rie Shimoda. Its organising theme is Araki's relationship with his wife Yoko — from their meeting in 1968 until her death in 1990, and the sustained presence she continued to exert in his work thereafter. As Araki has stated, it was through Yoko that he became a photographer in the fullest sense. The exhibition title's open dash — 1971–2017– — signals an ongoing trajectory rather than a closed retrospective.
The catalogue situates Yoko within Araki's broader practice of "I-Photography": an autobiographical mode that fuses eros and thanatos, the intimate and the urban, the domestic and the transgressive. Alongside photographs of Yoko, the volume includes work that registers her presence through absence — flowers, the cat Chiro, Tokyo street scenes, bodies in bondage — all recurring motifs in Araki's output across more than five decades and over 500 published photobooks.
Contributors
Texts are contributed by: Gozo Yoshimasu (poet); Juergen Teller, Seiichi Furuya, Miyako Ishiuchi, and Daido Moriyama (photographers); Toshiharu Ito (Professor, Department of Inter-Media Art, Tokyo University of the Arts); Filippo Maggia (Director, Head of Projects, Fondazione Fotografica Modena); Michio Kasahara (Tokyo Photographic Art Museum); and Hiromi Kitazawa (curator).
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About Nobuyoshi Araki
Nobuyoshi Araki studied photography and film at Chiba University's Department of Photography, Painting and Engineering. In 1964, shortly after joining the advertising agency Dentsu, his project Satchin was awarded the First Taiyo Prize. He remained at Dentsu until 1972. At the agency he met Yoko, whom he married and documented in the self-published Sentimental Journey (1971) — a record of their honeymoon that became a foundational work in postwar Japanese photography. Eros and thanatos has remained the central axis of his practice, expressed across female portraiture, Japanese bondage, still life, and street photography. He has published more than 500 photobooks to date.
