The Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki met the love of his life, Aoki Yoko, in Tokyo in 1968 at the advertising agency at which they both worked. After a three-year romance, they married and in celebration Araki published his first book, Sentimental Journey. The pictures in the book – including this shot of Yoko on a dreamy boat trip with her lover – were a startlingly intimate portrait of their early relationship and their wedding and honeymoon. Araki called his practice I-photography, referencing the Japanese tradition of the confessional I-novel. Though his camera dwelt on his wife and muse, it was Araki’s way of seeing, his insider’s vantage, that the viewer was invited to share.
Araki, now 83, subsequently published dozens of books and became infamous for his erotic pictures, in particular his obsessive and sometimes disturbing interest in kinbaku, or rope bondage. His series about Yoko – included in a New York exhibition, Love Songs, conceived as a compilation gifted to a lover – suggests a more tender kind of looking. “It is thanks to Yoko that I became a photographer,” Araki always says.
Yoko died of ovarian cancer in 1990, and her husband published Winter Journey as a companion volume to the first book, chronicling with equal honesty his wife’s illness and her death. A third series of pictures, Sentimental Sky, was an attempt to photograph Yoko’s absence in their apartment and in his life. In the context of that later work, this image also takes on a kind ghostly quality, prefiguring the pictures Araki took of his wife adrift in her flower-filled coffin. Looking back at this image, he has noted the ways in which it has taken on a life of its own: “It is like crossing the Sanzu River in the afterlife, isn’t it? And there’s kind of a foetal look to it. It’s mysterious – [though] I didn’t really mean to be like that…”
Love Songs: Photography and Intimacy is at the International Center of Photography, New York, from 2 June to 11 September