Tokyo Comedy (Maya Portrait), 1980

Nobuyoshi Araki is the most prolific and consistently controversial figure in Japanese photography. He has produced countless pictures and more than five hundred photobooks since 1970 — a body of work that defies easy categorisation. 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 of his oeuvre. 

Arrested repeatedly in Japan for obscenity, he has nonetheless been exhibited at Tate Modern, SFMOMA and the Albertina in Vienna.