Tokyo Love by Nan Goldin and Nobuyoshi Araki: A Product of Beauty, Love, and Sexuality

Tokyo Love by Nan Goldin and Nobuyoshi Araki: A Product of Beauty, Love, and Sexuality

There are few artistic partnerships as brilliant as the one which developed between American photographer of the personal and the powerful, Nan Goldin, and her Japanese peer Nobuyoshi Araki, when the former spent time in Asia in the 1990s.

 
 

In 1992, the editors of the Japanese Magazine Deja-Vu invited Goldin to Tokyo to meet Nobuyoshi Araki, Goldin already aware of the “wild man of Japanese photography” and his diaristic, intensely sexual work. .

 
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Araki had procured a copy of her Ballad of Sexual Dependency, though it being unavailable in Japan due to stringent censorship laws

 
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Simply titled “Tokyo Love”, this book represents the collaboration between Goldin and Araki, who captured the life of adolescents in Tokyo, documenting the underground youth who defied society's preordained definitions of beauty, love and sexuality.

 
 

“I came back to Tokyo in the spring of 1994 to photograph the new Japanese youth and managed to track down my own tribe. I found a household of kids who are living by the same beliefs that I did as a teenager, and who transcended any definition of hetero or homosexual.”
- Nan Goldin