NOBUYOSHI ARAKI, Shashin Jidai INTERNATIONAL 1, Core Magazine, Tokyo, 1996

Nobuyoshi Araki / 荒木経惟 et al.
Shashin Jidai INTERNATIONAL 1 / 写真時代 INTERNATIONAL 1
Core Mook Series No. 7
Core Magazine, Tokyo, 1996
Softcover
21 × 28 cm · 113 pp.
Japanese language
ISBN 4-87734-065-3
Original price ¥1,280

Eight years after Shashin Jidai disappeared, it came back.

First launched in 1981 under editor Akira Suei, Shashin Jidai became one of the defining photographic magazines of 1980s Japan: a deliberately unstable mixture of serious photography, erotic imagery, popular culture and provocation, with Nobuyoshi Araki at its centre and regular contributions from photographers including Daido Moriyama, Seiji Kurata and Keizo Kitajima. Its increasingly explicit content brought repeated attention from the police, and the magazine ceased publication in 1988 following action over its nude photography.

Then, in 1996, the title was resurrected as Shashin Jidai INTERNATIONAL.

This first issue — published by Core Magazine as Core Mook Series No. 7 — is therefore not simply another Araki magazine appearance. It is a deliberate return to a publishing project that had been forcibly interrupted eight years earlier, with Araki once again given a central position. Contemporary listings even summarise the issue with the line “Araki is the main event after all.”

Araki contributes “Iro-onna / 色女”, alongside work by Masato Seto, Jin Ohashi, Kinichi Tanaka, Masahiko Taniguchi, Miwa Tosaki and others. The result picks up the original magazine’s refusal to keep photography neatly inside the art world: documentary, sexuality, street photography, bodies and popular publishing are allowed to collide on the same pages.

That history makes the word INTERNATIONAL on the cover feel almost grandiose — and slightly funny. This is Shashin Jidai returning in the middle of the 1990s, after Araki had moved from cult notoriety toward international art-world recognition, while retaining the deliberately low, commercial and unruly publishing format that had helped construct his public identity in the first place.

Even the cover refuses the expected photographic gravitas: a smiling woman in braids and gingham holding a large glass of beer, almost completely overtaken by the huge coral-red Shashin Jidai masthead. Art photography presented with the visual language of a mass-market magazine.

A particularly good Araki object because it documents not the beginning of the mythology, but its attempted restart — Shashin Jidai returning from the dead in 1996, with Araki still at the centre.

Condition: Good vintage condition. General rubbing, handling and light edge wear to covers consistent with age. Minor corner and surface wear. Please refer to photographs.

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