Tokyo Comedy (Maya Portrait), 1980

Nobuyoshi Araki is the most prolific and consistently controversial figure in Japanese photography. He has produced countless photographs and more than five hundred photobooks since 1970—a body of work that defies easy categorization. Trained at Chiba University and initially employed at the advertising firm Dentsu, Araki developed a deeply autobiographical practice he termed “I-photography”—a direct transposition of the Japanese confessional literary tradition into photographic form. 

Eros and Thanatos are the twin poles of his work: rope bondage, flowers, and Tokyo street scenes coexist with an unflinching engagement with grief—most powerfully in *Sentimental Journey* (1971), his record of married life with Yoko, whose death in 1990 became the defining rupture in his oeuvre. 

Although he was arrested repeatedly in Japan on obscenity charges, his work has nonetheless been exhibited at Tate Modern, SFMOMA, and the Albertina in Vienna.