Born in Tokyo in 1940, Nobuyoshi Araki is considered one of the most influential figures in international contemporary photography. Author of over five hundred photographic books, he has developed throughout his career a deeply autobiographical research, built around what he himself has defined as I-Photography: an artistic practice capable of transforming daily life, affections, desire, loss and the passage of time into narrative material. His works are preserved in the permanent collections of some of the world’s most important museum institutions, from the Tate Modern in London to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, from the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Yet, beyond international recognition, his work continues to maintain a profoundly human and personal dimension, capable of connecting private experience and collective memory.
Photography, for him, has never been merely a tool of representation, but a form of existence, a way to inhabit time, to hold it before it disappears. His overwhelming and compulsive practice of photographing in order not to lose the moment and to capture the life that revolves around him, transforms each shot into a testimony of the instant, into a gesture of resistance against oblivion.
Pietro Molinas Balata: “With his genius, Araki manages to represent the varied spheres of woman, flora and things, from which he brings out the hidden and secret parts, those more or less ardent and others particularly dreamlike: imaginal visions that ennoble the spirit.”
In this journey, the Polaroid occupies a privileged place. When Araki discovers its expressive possibilities, the instant photograph becomes much more than a technical medium, transforming into an extension of memory and body, into an immediate form of visual writing, the ideal medium for an artist who has always sought to capture the continuous flow of life without filters.
