preview

Nobuyoshi Araki's Photography Controversy

Better Essays

I first encountered Nobuyoshi Araki’s work at an exhibition on contemporary Japanese art titled Mirror Neuron held in Tokyo in 2013. Among works by renowned artists hung Araki’s extremely provocative photograph titled Kinbaku. I was shocked yet somehow mesmerized by the work.. The woman in the photo, dangling hopelessly and powerlessly in front of the male photographer’s camera lens appeared to be obviously sexualized, objectified, and dehumanized.
Despite my reaction, Araki (b. 1940) is a respected photographer who has published over four hundred photo books in the past three decades. Most of his works depict nude women. The photographs originally caused much controversy because of their erotic and pornographic content, but today are highly …show more content…

For example, Araki uses kimono, a Japanese traditional attire, on the model. The bound woman is wearing a turquoise colored kimono with yellow patterns. The red bottom layer of the kimono is revealed underneath top layer, framing her genitals. Another traditional essence is seen in the environment photo is captured. The scene takes place in a traditional Japanese house, which one can tell from the interior. The horizontal wooden pillar in the room that the woman’s arms are tied to for suspension is typical architecture in traditional houses. The tatami mattress for the floor and the shoji screens on either sides of the window in the background also add to dictating the environment. The photo shares much similarity with Shunga, a popular genre of woodblock prints that first appeared in the seventeenth century. Shunga also typically depicts women wearing kimono with exposed breasts and genitals in exaggerated sexual positions. The distinction between fine art and pornography, which was established in the West, had not yet pervaded the East. However by the end of nineteenth century, pressure to conform to Western ideologies led to the decline of Shunga. Although Shunga is often more sexually explicit than Araki’s Kinbaku, because of the passage of time, shunga pieces are now valued as historical …show more content…

He writes, “To our western minds, bondage makes women victims of acts they are helpless to prevent. The scenes of bondage...are artistic because they do not interrupt the blood flow at any point...A sophisticated balancing act qualifies the ‘heavy bondage’, lending it the harmony of a formula.” Araki uses bondage as a metaphor for rigidly structured Japanese society, especially for women. In Kinbaku, the woman is tied up multiple times. Her arms appear to be tied behind her and her legs and head hang lifelessly unable to touch the floor. The rope is also tied around her chest intensifying the sense of pain. Her physical restriction and constraint symbolizes Japanese society after WW II. The country experienced rapid urban expansion economic growth until the end of the twentieth century. Tradition and modernity clashed in a tight living space. Many young women were trying to find their freedom and place in this modernizing space, yet “regardless of how emancipated women may be, they remain subject to a strict, highly ritualized set of traditional roles, obligations, rules, and hierarchies.” The way the woman is framed in the rectangle in the photo created by the pillar at the top, the floor at the bottom, and the shoji screen on either sides of her reflects the structuralized rigidity of the country. The out-of-focus trees seen in the window behind the woman indicates the freedom

Get Access