Nobuyoshi Araki

obuyoshi Araki was born in 1940 in Minowa, in central Tokyo, where he still lives and works. At the age of six, his father gave him a camera, and from that moment on, photography became an obsession for him, as did the theme of eroticism, which he has explored since the early 1970s. He is fascinated by the naked female body, female genitalia, sex, and death. In an interview with Jérôme Sans in 2007, he stated: “Women have all the charm of life within themselves. They possess all the essential attributes: beauty, ugliness, obscenity, purity… much more than nature. In a woman, there is the sea and the sky. (This may sound sentimental). In a woman, there is the bud and the flower... A photographer who doesn’t take pictures of women is not a photographer, or a third-rate photographer. Women teach you much more about the world than reading Balzac’s Comédie Humaine. Whether it’s your wife, a one-night stand, or a prostitute, women teach you how the world works. After all, I stopped reading when I finished elementary school. I built my life by getting to know women.”