Blue Period / Last Summer

Blue Period / Last Summer pairs two chapters of Nobuyoshi Araki's ongoing photographic diary, its cover a nude print overpainted by the artist in raw washes of color. The hand-applied intervention recurs throughout his later work.

Published by Dashwood Books in December 2017, the paperback gathers photographs alongside earlier negatives reworked with paint and other additions, a method Araki has used to layer new marks onto images made years apart. Its two titled sections each trace a season, a blue period and a last summer, continuing his habit of dating and naming bodies of work as entries in one continuous private record rather than as discrete, self-contained series.

Araki has published several hundred books since the 1970s, moving between the erotic, the domestic, and the elegiac often within a single volume; his self-portraits, images of his late wife Yoko, and his hallmark kinbaku rope photography sit alongside street and sky pictures in an oeuvre organized less by genre than by the calendar of his own life. Blue Period / Last Summer belongs to the later period of that project, in which the photograph becomes raw material for further mark-making rather than a finished, untouched object.