Araki by Araki

Araki by Araki is Nobuyoshi Araki's own retrospective selection of his photography, a career-spanning survey chosen and sequenced by the artist himself rather than an outside editor or curator.

Across 568 pages the book moves through the subjects that recur across Araki's five-decade output: Tokyo street life, food, faces, flowers photographed with an erotic intensity, and the rope-bound bodies of his kinbaku work. Araki has described the bondage photographs as a collaboration with his subjects, built on conversation rather than direction, and the sequencing here plays that vocabulary of restraint and release against his gentler still lifes and portraits.

Published by TASCHEN with text by Jérôme Sans, the book is one of several Araki has titled around his own name, distinct from the earlier Kodansha volume Araki by Araki: The Photographer's Personal Selection issued for his sixtieth birthday. Araki has published more than 500 books since the 1970s, and this edition stands as one of the most widely available single-volume overviews of that output.