Araki. Tokyo Lucky Hole
Nobuyoshi Araki
Japan's sex industry in full flower. In more than 800 photos, Nobuyoshi Araki captures the sex shows, orgies, and bizarre crazes of Tokyo's Shinjuku red light district. From no-panties massage parlors to the notorious commuter-train fetishists, this is the last word on an age of bacchanalia, infused with moments of humor, poetry, and questioning interjections.
Nobuyoshi Araki was born in Tokyo in 1940. Given a camera by his father at the ripe age of twelve, Araki has been taking pictures ever since. He studied photography and film at Chiba University and went into commercial photography soon after graduating. In 1970 he created his famous Xeroxed Photo Albums, which he produced in limited editions and sent to friends, art critics, and people selected randomly from the telephone book. Over the years, his bold, unabashed photographs of his private life have been the object of a great deal of controversy and censorship (especially in his native Japan), a fact that has not fazed the artist nor diminished his influence. To date, Araki has published over 400 books of his work.