NOBUYOSHI ARAKI
INSTANTS

Polaroids occupy an essential place in Araki’s practice. Through their immediacy and materiality, they reinforce the direct and everyday dimension of his work, while inscribing each image within a vast collection of series.

The exhibition at Yvon Lambert brings together a selection of Polaroids taken between 2006 and 2016. It covers ten years of production and highlights its formal and thematic coherence. The female body is the central focus, in dialogue with natural motifs—flowers, insects, organic elements—that run through his entire body of work.

This selection highlights a continuity in the subjects addressed and the method employed. Repetition functions as a working principle: returning to the same motifs allows the artist to explore their variations and affirm their presence over the years. The Polaroids, with their intimate format and frontal perspective, encapsulate this approach, combining proximity, intensity and continuity.

NOBUYOSHI ARAKI

Nobuyoshi Araki (born in 1940 in Tokyo) is one of the leading figures in contemporary and post-war Japanese photography. Since the 1960s, he has developed a prolific body of work that articulates intimacy, eroticism, mourning and observation of the city of Tokyo. Published in more than five hundred books and presented in numerous international exhibitions, his work occupies a central place in the history of photography while sparking debate and controversy.

After graduating from Chiba University in 1963, he began his career as an advertising photographer at Dentsu before going freelance in the early 1970s. In 1971, Sentimental Journey, taken during his honeymoon with his wife Yōko Aoki, marked a turning point: photography became an overtly autobiographical medium. After Yōko’s death in 1990, his work became even more explicitly a dialogue between Eros and Thanatos, between life and death, making the image a direct record of everyday life, loss and the passage of time.

Araki advocates an instinctive approach to photography: “I don’t think about photography, I capture the moment.” For him, images are not a tool for documentation but a reflection of feelings and experiences. This position feeds into a practice based on immediacy and repetition over time, where the act of photography becomes almost daily.

His work has been the subject of numerous major exhibitions, notably at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, the Musée national des arts asiatiques – Guimet in Paris, the Barbican Art Gallery in London and the IZU Photo Museum. He has also received several awards, including the Annual Prize of the Japan Photographic Society (1990) and the Austrian Decoration of Honour for Science and Art (2008).