“I was no sooner out of my mother's womb, than I turned around and photographed her sex!"

The subject of the first volume in our new TASCHEN Limited series is Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki, a man who talks about life through photographs. Araki’s powerful oeuvre, decade’s worth of images, has been pared down to 1,000 photographs to comprise the ultimate retrospective collection of his work. This volume, titled Araki, is an enormous and highly unique book with a print run of only 2,500 signed and numbered copies worldwide.

Known equally for his intimate images of women, often bound in kinbaku, the Japanese art of rope-tying, and for images of brilliant, sensual flowers, Araki is an intensely emotional artist who uses photography to experience these passionate feelings more fully. Obsessed with women, Araki seeks to come closer to them through his work, using ropes like an embrace, and the click of the shutter like a kiss, creating provocative images at once shocking and mysteriously tender. He said of this collaboration with TASCHEN: "This book will expose everything of myself. It is a testament which reads: photography is love and death."

Hardcover: 560 pages

Publisher: Taschen; Taschen 25th Anniversary Ed edition (April 15, 2007)

Language: English