NOBUYOSHI ARAKI & JUERGEN TELLER, Leben und Tod, Steidl, Göttingen, 2020

Nobuyoshi Araki / 荒木経惟 & Juergen Teller
Leben und Tod
Steidl, Göttingen, 2020
First edition
Softcover in purple sleeve
26 × 19 cm · 72 pp.
67 colour photographs
English language
Text and design by Juergen Teller
ISBN 978-3-95829-745-6

Sealed in original publisher’s shrink-wrap
The New Rare Shrinkwrap Collection

Leben und Tod — Life and Death — brings together Nobuyoshi Araki and Juergen Teller in an unusually intimate exchange around mourning, memory, family and the stubborn persistence of objects.

The project grew out of their joint exhibition at artspace AM in Tokyo in 2019. Teller had been photographing following the deaths of his uncle and stepfather Artur: his mother, now widowed again; the Bavarian town of Bubenreuth where he grew up; and the ordinary landscape of home. These images sit against photographs made while travelling in Bhutan with his partner Dovile Drizyte, placing fertility, sexuality and life beside grief and disappearance.

Araki responded by asking Teller to send him objects from his childhood.

Teller returned to his mother’s house and selected things carrying particular emotional weight — toys, a porcelain figure and small bridges made in his family’s violin-making workshop. The objects travelled from Bavaria to Tokyo, where Araki arranged and photographed them in his own home. The collaboration therefore unfolds through displacement: Teller’s memories become physical objects, cross continents, and enter Araki’s photographic world.

The exchange gives the book its peculiar emotional charge. Teller photographs loss through people and places; Araki approaches it through things. Death is never allowed to settle into solemnity, but is continually pushed against sex, fertility, humour and the material survival of objects.

Araki and Teller had already been brought together for Araki Teller Teller Araki at OstLicht, Vienna, in 2014. By the time of Leben und Tod, the relationship had become more personal. Araki described Teller publicly as being like his son, giving the project an additional generational dimension: a book concerned with the death of a father figure becoming, at the same time, a record of another kind of artistic kinship.

This copy remains sealed in its original publisher’s shrink-wrap, and in that state the book acquires another layer. A publication about life, death, memory, attachment and loss remains physically inaccessible, its images still unseen by its owner, its contents held intact behind a thin transparent membrane.

For that reason, this copy also forms part of The New Rare Shrinkwrap Collection — publications whose unopened state is no longer merely packaging, but part of the identity of the particular object.

The saturated purple sleeve, Araki’s gestural black lettering and the untouched plastic make this especially strong in sealed state: a book about intimacy that remains closed.

Condition: New / unopened. Sealed in original publisher’s shrink-wrap, with minor compression and rubbing to the external plastic from storage. The book itself has never been opened. Please refer to photographs.

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