Collection: Nobuyoshi Araki

Nobuyoshi Araki (born 1940, Tokyo) is one of the most prolific and widely exhibited photographers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Working almost exclusively in Tokyo, Araki developed a practice rooted in personal narrative, erotic photography, still life and urban observation, producing thousands of books, editions and exhibition catalogues across a career spanning more than five decades.

His first major work, Sentimental Journey (1971), documented his honeymoon with his wife Yoko in a sequence of intimate photographs that established the diary-like, confessional mode that would define much of his subsequent output. Later series — including Tokyo Lucky Hole, Akt-Tokyo, Flower and Sentimental Journey / Winter Journey — extended this approach across eroticism, mortality, the female body and the textures of Tokyo street life.

By the 1990s, Araki’s work was circulating widely through European museums and publishers. Major exhibitions at institutions including the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and the Barbican Centre brought his image world into contact with international audiences, generating a substantial body of exhibition catalogues, postcards and printed matter that document this period of expanded institutional reception.

Printed matter, postcards and exhibition ephemera produced in connection with Araki’s practice offer a compressed record of one of photography’s most sustained and contested bodies of work.