ARAKI Ojo Shashu - Photography for the Afterlife: Alluring Hell
FOAM photo gallery in Amsterdam has an amazing Araki exhibition running until March 11, 2015. I visited the gallery after Christmas, and the admission price was well worth it.
In Europe, Araki is mostly known for his kinbaku photography. I think many associate Araki with erotic photography, but this excludes a huge body of his work (he's published over 450 photo books during his career so far!).
The current exhibition at FOAM is great at capturing several aspects of his work. Recent projects with colourful still life photography of flowers and dolls is represented alongside pictures from his iconic Sentimental Journey, pictures from his Subway series, and re-imagined versions of kinbaku photography where he's gone back and added colour to old kinbaku portraits by painting over the negatives or the prints.
A re-imagined kinbaku portrait on the left, a picture from one of his latest projects to the right. In the still life photography, the flowers usually represent life, while the dolls represent death - or so I'm told anyway.
While the gallery fails to emphasize the volume and impact of his collected work, I love that they've added scenes from Subway, Sentimental Journey, Diary, and Chiro Love Death to showcase that he's done, and is still doing, much more than the kinbaku shots he's famous for in Europe. The street photography style (Subway, Diary) and emotional subject matter (Sentimental Journey, Chiro Love Death) is a welcome change to the usually overly artistic crap European photo galleries insist on calling photo exhibitions. There is a very sentimental feel to Araki's street photography. He captures every day things and make them stand out. Pushing boundaries, creating surreal scenes out of ordinary events - Diary has a lot of good examples of this. Araki's still life projects and re-imagined kinbaku portraits help draw in and satisfy the art crowd, I guess. That's not to say I don't enjoy those projects, I just enjoy the every day style photography more.
Sentimental Journey will always have a special place in my heart. It's a beautiful book. Seeing the actual prints was very emotional. It's a very intimate series documenting his honeymoon before his wife passed away.
Similarly, Chiro Love Death chronicles his time with Chiro, the couple's cat that he was left with after his wife died, and Chiro's death 20 years after his wife's passing.
His ability to document these personal events continues to be a source of inspiration to me. I find it very beautiful.
Christian and I have been collecting Araki photobooks over the years. We've caught a few exhibitions in Japan, but nothing as large as this. We picked up a couple of new additions to our collection while in Amsterdam at the show, this is our collection of Araki photobooks now:
This looks a little ridiculous, but please do keep in mind that he's published over 450 of these things...
If you're not familiar with Araki or his work (or even if you are!), I would recommend checking out 東京日和 (Tokyo Biyori), which is a biopic following the story behind Sentimental Journey. I thought it was a great film, Araki himself makes a cameo as a train conductor.