Nobuyoshi Araki’s Archival Corpo-Rapture

Ana Došen

Abstract


Nobuyoshi Araki is one of the most famous and controversial Japanese photographers, whose work amounts to several hundred publications. Over the course of nearly five decades, this prolific artist’s ‘photo-mania’ dealing with, among various subject matters, a depiction of human bodies, often eroticized and graphic, has been both celebrated and heavily criticized. Instead of contributing to those discourses of either support or disdain of his artistic vision – especially on the issue of fetishized female nudity – this paper focuses on Araki’s insatiable lust for capturing Japan’s corporeality. His unrelenting inspiration to encapsulate Japanese bodily images has generated an immense collection of not only personal(ized) memories, but also of various types of archives – intimate and public – of the spontaneous and the staged, reflecting the ephemeral, transitory or epochal. Drawing on Derrida’s notion of archive in realtion to Freudian death drive, this paper explores Araki’s archive fever as a mechanism of subjective power imposed on the collective body. The proliferation of his photo series unveils Araki’s tendency to ‘destroy’ the previous encounters while simultaneously adding to his ultimate repository of somatic images with each new volume.

Article received: December 10, 2018; Article accepted: January 23, 2019; Published online: April 15, 2019; Original scholarly paper

How to cite this article: Došen, Ana. "Nobuyoshi Araki’s Archival Corpo-Rapture." AM Journal of Art and Media Studies 18 (2019): 107–116. doi: 10.25038/am.v0i18.301


Keywords


Nobuyoshi Araki; photography; body; archive fever; eros; thanatos

Full Text:

PDF

References


Arakimentari. Directed by Travis Klose. Troopers Films, 2004.

Araki, Nobuyoshi. “My mother’s death, or an introduction to home photography.” In Araki : Self, Life, Death, edited by Akiko Miki, Yoshiko Issihaki and Tomoko Sato, 557–64. London, New York: Phaidon Press, 2005.

Buisson, Dominique. Japan Unveiled: Understanding Japanese Body Culture. London: Hachette Illustrated UK, Octopus Publishing Group, 2003.

Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Chicago, London: The University of Chicago Press, 1998.

Hagiwara, Hiroko. “Representation, Distribution, and Formation of Sexuality in the Photography of Araki Nobuyoshi.” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 18, 1 (2010): 231–51. doi: 10.1215/10679847-2009-029

Kosuga, Tomo. “Nobuyoshi Araki.” Vice (July 2008) https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/yvngdx/nobuyoshi-araki-118-v15n7. Accessed December 15, 2018.

Nancy, Jean-Luc. Corpus. New York: Fordham University Press, 2008.

Obrist, Hans Ulrich. “In Conversation With Araki.” In Araki: Self, Life, Death, eds. Akiko Miki, Yoshiko Issihaki and Tomoko Sato, 249–56. London, New York: Phaidon Press, 2005.

Turnbull, Stephen. Samurai: The World of the Warrior. Oxford: Osprey Publishing, 2003.

Watkins, Jonathan. “Ice That Doesn’t Melt.” In Araki: Self, Life, Death, eds. Akiko Miki, Yoshiko Issihaki and Tomoko Sato, 21–24. London, New York: Phaidon Press, 2005.

Yasumi, Akihito. “The Photographer between a Man and a Woman.” In Araki: Tokyo Lucky Hole. Köln: TASCHEN, 2016.




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.25038/am.v0i18.301

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Copyright (c) 2019 AM Journal of Art and Media Studies

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

The content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

AM Journal of Art and Media Studies ISSN 2217-9666 - printed, ISSN 2406-1654 - online, UDK 7.01:316.774

Contact: amjournal@outlook.com

Publisher: Faculty of Media and Communications, Singidunum University, Belgrade, Serbia

Indexed in: ERIH PLUSEBSCODOAJ, and in The List of Scientific Journals Categorization of Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of Republic of Serbia (M24-2021). Beginning with No. 12 2017, AM is indexed, abstracted and covered in Clarivate Analytics service ESCI.