Nobuyoshi Araki Tokyo Nostalgia 1999 First Edition Photography Book

Description

Nobuyoshi Araki has photographed Tokyo obsessively for decades, turning the city into something between autobiography, diary and love affair. Tokyo Nostalgia is Araki looking at his city through memory: faces, streets, lovers, anonymous corners, buildings and fleeting encounters accumulate into a Tokyo that is less a document of a place than a record of what it feels like to have lived there. The photographs have the looseness and immediacy that make Araki’s books so compelling—the sense that photography and everyday life have become virtually indistinguishable.

Published by Heibonsha in 1999, Tokyo Nostalgia is particularly interesting for collectors who know Araki primarily through his more notorious erotic work. Sex may have made him famous in the West, but Tokyo is arguably the great continuing subject of his career. Here the city itself becomes intimate: portraits sit beside streetscapes, chance encounters beside fragments of urban landscape. The result is unmistakably Araki, but quieter, more reflective and deeply personal. This copy retains the original publisher’s slipcase.

A substantial and beautifully made Araki book—and a terrific way into the Tokyo that sits at the center of his entire photographic life.