About the Work
The end of love! Before he, similar to the film director Nagisa Ōshima with his fatally lived out love ecstasies in "In the Realm of the Senses" (1976), caused a sensation all over the world with his bondage photos of the tied up, bound female body, Nobuyoshi Araki followed his wife Yoko with the camera to her death. Flowers, especially orchids with their flowering, dying instinct, adorned the journey from the couple's wedding day to 1991, the year of her death. They wilt along a path that Araki described in his famous book of photographs "Sentimental Journey" with a similarly painful obsession as the painter Ferdinand Hodler described the emaciation of his companion Valentine Godé-Darel's life by cancer. Withered, in the vicinity of the grieving photographer, Arakis flowers mourn the loss – "Laments: From Close-Range". His "photo-ego" then turns completely to body art. In realistic images that know no difference between sexual passion and artistic erotic action, Araki arrives at the analogy of bondage and embrace. He anticipates censorship by overpainting delicate details.
