NOBUYOSHI ARAKI | UNTITLED (FROM THE SERIES FLOWERS AND TOKYO SHIJYO), 1998

In an interview with Nan Goldin in 1995, Nobuyoshi Araki explained, ‘Photography was destined to be involved with death. Reality is in colour, but at its beginnings photography always discoloured reality and turned it into black and white. Colour is life, black and white is death. A ghost was hiding in the invention of photography.’ This notion is perfectly represented in this beautiful set of six prints, Untitled (from ‘Flowers and Tokyo Shijyo’), 1998, a work created by the juxtaposition of images belonging to the artist’s series of Flowers and archived stills recovered from his 1970s film, Death Reality.

Araki’s groupings are a constant reminder of some of the most seminal paradoxes in the history of art: growth and decay, morality and sin. The artist’s studies of colourful flowers, reminiscent of the work by Robert Mapplethorpe, are both sensually evocative and charged with cultural significance, tracing back to ikebana, the meditative art of Japanese flower arrangement. These images are then placed above the ghostly degraded prints of old transparencies from the series Death Reality depicting two of Araki’s most recurrent subjects, women and the streets of Tokyo.

This work, Untitled, composed of three silver prints and three cibachromes, is an ode to the overarching theme in Araki’s work, life and death. As he puts it, ‘In the act of love, as in photography, there is a form of life and a kind of slow death’.