CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 3/13/2019

Radical intimacy in 'Araki: Impossible Love'

Featured collage, from Nobuyoshi Araki's 1973 Tokyo series, is reproduced from Araki: Impossible Love, the powerful new release from Steidl. Published to accompany a recent show of mostly "vintage" photographs at C/O Berlin, this 368-page monograph highlights "what Araki has been confronting and engaging with for decades: radical intimacy in the interweaving of personal experiences with external social tensions," curator Felix Hoffmann writes. "The immediacy of his photos often comes in part from the exhibitionism of his surroundings as it catches his gaze. As collages, his photos continually reveal aspects of a dysfunctional society that is too often based on superficial values, and question the social responsibility and moral attitudes of its members. Araki's extreme proximity to and familiarity with the people and situations in his photographs makes them unique and revolutionary. In contrast to classic photojournalists, who only look into foreign worlds from the outside, Araki not only takes part in the lives of his subjects; he assumes an essential role in his pictures that is far from voyeuristic. The tension between the classic composition of Araki's photographs and his very particular choice of themes gives rise to a direct, intensive visual language that is as moving as it is unsettling."