Siena celebrates the great Japanese photographer with a selection of 2,200 pictures spanning a career of more than 50 years.

Effetto Araki

Siena, Santa Maria della Scala

21 June – 30 September 2019

Thursday 20 June sees the opening in Siena's #santamariadellascala museum complex of a major new exhibition devoted to Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki (b. 1940, Tokyo). The exhibition, organized by Santa Maria della Scala with the support of Opera-Civita, is curated by Filippo Maggia who has selected photographs from over twenty series taken by Araki from the early 1960s to the present day. 

Araki was eager to celebrate his work over the past 50 years (he held his first show in 1965) with a selection of 2,200 works reviewing his long artistic career and offering a virtually complete overview of his endless, highly complex and multi-faceted output, which stretches well beyond the bondage pictures that have made him a household name worldwide. 

Many of the series – Satchin and his brother Mabo, Sentimental night in Kyoto, August, Tokyo Autumn and others –are being shown in Italy for the very first time, and for some of them – for example Anniversary of Hokusai’s Death and Gloves – it is also their European debut, while the Araki’s Paradise collection, consisting of photographs that Araki took using his own home as his set, has been specially produced for the Siena exhibition: thus an original, meditative and exciting Araki who appears to wish to condense his entire experience both as an artist and as a man in this show.

The exhibition includes the tale of Satchin and his brother Mabo, two boys who were Araki's neighbours, with pictures dating back to the 1960s; Subway of Love, a set of photographs taken in the Tokyo underground at the turn of the 1970s; classic portraits of elegant Japanese ladies and gentlemen and the compositions entitled Araki’s Lovers from the 1980s and '90s; a sophisticated selection of bondage shots; pictures taken in the first decade of the 21st century from his Tokyo Diary, a photographic diary that Araki has been keeping with meticulous regularity since the 1980s; and a story put together in 2017 entitled Anniversary of Hokusai’s Death, a tribute to the great Japanese painter and engraver Katsushika Hokusai.

Alongside the complete version of his touching Sentimental Journey (an account of his honeymoon with his wife Yoko in 108 black-and-white photographs), the exhibition also hosts the Italian debut of the equally touching Sentimental night in Kyoto, in addition to his Amant d’Août dedicated to the model Komari, the series of photographs that he took to mark the 60th anniversary of the end of

World War II entitled The 60th year after the End of the War, and some twenty diptychs from a series entitled Tokyo Nude portraying iconic architectural works in the Japanese capital alongside female nudes. 

Juxtaposed with Polaroid photographs arranged on tables, consisting of snapshots recounting the artist's daily life in Tokyo, are two recent series devoted to his native city entitled Tokyo Summer Story and Tokyo Autumn, the former light and bright like the hot summer in the Japanese capital, the latter melancholy and intimate, veiled in twilight. 

Alongside floral compositions, the fleeting beauty of life is also celebrated in a series entitled Balcony of Love consisting of photographs arranged on Araki's terrace at home in the presence of his cat Ciro, the Japanese photographer's inseparable life partner. 

The exhibition is completed by a video tracking Araki as he chooses the photographs for the exhibition in the company of curator Filippo Maggia and a catalogue book, published by Skira, containing a selection of 300 photographs chosen from among those on display in the exhibition.

Further information in the press release to download