Monochrome Paradise

Monochrome Paradise gathers seventy-five black-and-white photographs in which Nobuyoshi Araki turns dolls, dying flowers, and toy animals into a small theater of decay and desire.

Published by Adachi Press in 2015, the book continues Araki's long-running "Paradise" project, begun after his wife Yoko's death with A's Paradise and carried forward through qARADISE and It Was Once a Paradise. Still-life arrangements of plastic figurines and cut flowers alternate with portraits, among them Umezu Kazuo, Setouchi Jakucho, Araki's longtime muse Kaori, and a cameo appearance by Lady Gaga. Text runs in Japanese and English.

Araki has spent more than five decades photographing Tokyo, sex, flowers, and mortality with the same directness, and the "Paradise" series is one of his most sustained treatments of aging and bodily decline. Monochrome Paradise stands with his diaristic bondage work and city photographs as one more entry in a body of work he keeps reworking from a small set of fixed obsessions.