Nobuyoshi Araki - Arakitronics - 1994

Arakitronics

Nobuyoshi Araki
Fuga-shobo/1994/Japanese/22×28cm

Arakitronics / Arakitronics" is a collection of photographs by Nobuyoshi Araki, one of Japan's leading photographers. This book is a collection of reconstructed images taken for the CD-ROM photo book “Arakitronics,” and is Araki's first work using a digital camera. Shot in a studio with a single female model, the images consist mainly of fetishistic nudes clad in net tights and kimonos. Araki's attempt here is a challenge to the conventional way of photography, which gives a privileged meaning to a single cut and tries to control it through arbitrary aesthetics. The photography critic Kotaro Iizawa writes at the end of the book that "quantity, not quality, sequence, not moment, and the essential anarchism of image, not order, are opposed to the principles that have continued to covertly dominate photography. It seems that the company is working to update the way photographs are presented and expressed in the new formats of digital and CD-ROMs. Although some of the photographs are rough due to insufficient resolution for printing, they express "the power inherent in eroticism in a straightforward manner.