Nobuyushi Araki .
Nobuyushi Araki is considered to be one of the most prolific artists alive or dead in Japan today. Many of his photographs are erotic, some have been called pornographic. He has created a lot of controversy during his career he has been branded everything from a monster, to a pornographer to a genius. Araki’s has taken thousands of published photographs dealing with all manner of different subject matters. To date he has published over 350 different books and in a recent installation at the Barbican in London entitled, Self, Life, Death his photographs filled the whole of the main exhibiting space. But I would say that Araki is best known images deal with erotic themes and bound women, he has said that his intentions have always been to combine the fantastical with the everyday which may explain why he used his late wife in a number of these fantasy images.
A series of Araki Polaroid pictures
The images bellow are some of Araki’s most famous and most controversial image, personally I could under stand why people viewing these image could get the impression that these photographs are taken by a man playing out his fantasies with bondage and S and M like, sexual perversions. But there’s something about these images that to me make them more than just that, something I think that makes these images much darker and more disturbing and thus more shocking to the viewer. The images to me resemble kidnappings or even images taken from a murder scene. Images you might find more fitting in a police investigation film that an art gallery. All of his subject in the photographs below and in lots of his other photographs like this are bound sometimes gagged and occasionally strung up. It strikes me that the images have a lot darker undercurrent to them than just mildly pornographic bondage pictures.
