Nobuyoshi Araki: Eros Diary

Eros Diary collects eighty-seven new photographs in which Nobuyoshi Araki turns from provocation toward something quieter: an old man taking stock of loss.

Published by Anthony d'Offay in 2016 to accompany Araki's exhibition of the same name at Anton Kern Gallery in New York, the book reproduces seventy-seven black-and-white and ten color images. Each photograph carries a timestamp keyed to the date of Araki's marriage to his late wife Yoko, which also falls on Tanabata, the Japanese festival built around a folktale of separated lovers reunited for one night a year. The recurring date threads the book together and keeps Yoko present in her absence.

Araki made the pictures while dealing with prostate cancer, the loss of sight in one eye, and the death of his cat Chiro, and that accumulation of grief gives Eros Diary a softness rare in his catalogue of erotic and urban photography. Coming more than four decades into his career, it reads as a late, private counterpart to the diaristic work that made him famous.