Araki

"I was no sooner out of my mother's womb than I photographed her vagina!"

Colorscapes · Still Life · Love in Winter · Flower Rondo · Private Photography · Chiro Novel Photography · Kyoto White Sentiment · Obscenities · Tokyo Comedy Bondage · Angel's Festival · Spermanko · Amaryllis · Tokyo Love · Naked Faces · Paradise Summer: Retrographs · In Ruins · Pola-Porno · Close-Range · Erotos · Sexual Desire Tokyo Nostalgia · The Banquet · Photo-Maniac Big Diary · Private Diary · A's Lovers · Shino Color Rays · Tokyo Nude · Tokyo Autumn

The first title in our new TASCHEN limited series is Araki, an enormous and unique book with a print run of only 2,500 copies. The subject is Japanese photographer Araki, a man who talks about life through photographs. His powerful oeuvre, decades' worth of images, has been pared down to about 1,000 photographs which tell the story of Araki and comprise the ultimate retrospective collection of his work. Known best for his intimate, snapshot-style images of women often tied up with ropes (kinbaku, Japanese rope-tying art) and of colorful, sensual flowers, Araki is an artist who reacts strongly to his emotions and uses photography to experience them more fully. Obsessed with women, Araki seeks to come closer to them through photography, using ropes like an embrace and the click of the shutter like a kiss. His work is at once shocking and mysteriously tender; a deeply personal artist, Araki is not afraid of his emotions nor of showing them to the world.

He said of this collaboration with TASCHEN: "This book reveals everything about me. It's been a sixty-year contract, near enough. Photography is love and death - that'll be my epitaph."

- Limited edition of 2,500 copies worldwide, each numbered and signed by Araki

- Interviews by Jérôme Sans

- Extensive bibliography and biography section

- All color illustrations are color-separated and reproduced in Aniva, the finest reproduction technique available today, which provides unequalled intensity and color range. The duotone illustrations are made with Novatone, a special treatment for black and white images that produces exquisite tonal range and density. Thanks to these cutting-edge procedures, the state-of-the-art reproductions in the book are hardly distinguishable from the original prints made by Araki himself.

N.B. This preview brochure's size, paper stock and image quality are identical to those of the actual book.

English/German/French/Japanese, hardcover, XXL-format: 34.5 x 50 cm (13^5/8 x 19^3/4 inches), c. 640 pp., c. 1,000 ills. / US$ 1,250 / euro 1,250 / ¥ 150,000

TASCHEN