Nobuyoshi Araki: Vintage Prints

Nobuyoshi Araki: Vintage Prints documents a rare New York showing of prints Araki made himself, close to the time each picture was taken, rather than the later reprints through which most of his work is known.

Published by Dashwood Books with Taka Ishii Gallery on the occasion of Araki's first solo exhibition at the gallery's New York space (April 4–28, 2018), the 48-page softcover reproduces all twenty-one vintage prints in the show, designed by Alex Lin of Studio Lin and issued in an edition of 500. The selected images move from the 1970s, when Araki left a career in advertising to photograph Tokyo with a tripod-mounted Pentax and a fixed 55mm lens, through the streetscapes later published as Life and pictures from Tokyo, in Autumn, Pseudo-Diary, Tokyo Story, and The First Year of Heisei.

Vintage prints — made close to the date of the negative rather than later, for exhibition or sale — are unusual in Araki's practice given the sheer volume of his output, and this catalogue offers a rare document of his working prints across four formative decades, tracing the shift from his early, Atget- and Walker Evans-influenced cityscapes toward the diaristic, intimate mode for which he later became known.