john and yoko
I picked up this book a few weeks ago in a used shop in Shimokitazawa.
This is the 3rd volume of Nobuyoshi Araki’s collected works series. If you like some of Araki’s work, but not all of it, this would be a good series to look into. You can pretty much pick and choose the theme of his work that you want to see from the many volumes of this series.
This book is the photographic chronicle of his relationship with his wife, from meeting her at the ad agency Dentsu where they both worked in the 1960s(?) to her death from cancer in January of 199o.
Photographically, the photos are right-on they are intelligently taken, and well crafted black and white images. This is the work of a man obsessed with his wife and the act of photographing her. The desire to consume someone with a camera is something I can relate to with his work. The book progresses chronologically and the earlier photographs are my favorite. They are shot in a style that is slightly more mysterious than the later ones. Araki photographs Yoko from the view of a husband, a partner, sometimes like a stalker, and often as a participant. The earlier photographs seem almost dark- not somber or heavy, in fact all most all of them are taken with a lightness that is missing from a lot of today’s photography. But they are printed darker and run more mysterious with feeling. More like “Mirrors” than “Windows. As their marriage progresses the pictures of Yoko look to me like they are shot with more depictive clarity, of both his handling of the camera and his own eye. Yoko passes from simply a model to a model wife. Dark backgrounds of shabby tatami rooms are transfored into clean and lived in living rooms with sofas. Instead of eating cheap ramen in the shita-machi districts you might find Yoko across the table at a cafe in Paris. Nude shots also exist throughout the book, but in the later pages she is just as able to be photographed setting the table as she is getting out of the bathtub.
The last time we see Yoko is a picture of her face enveloped by flowers in her coffin. There are several pages of her ordeal with cancer that lead up to this shot, and if you read the book from front to back it naturally hits pretty heavy. The remaining black and white pictures are a few entirely appropriate and moving photographs of the sky. However, Araki has one more trick before the book is done. The final pages have color photographs of Yoko. In fact, it is this last section which spurned me to buy the book.
The last 9 pages consist of 15 color photographs of Yoko taken within the first few years of their marriage. They look like actual drugstore prints in a photo album. Their white borders are faded, and the colors muted in that way that old photos get to be. They stick out on the white paper of the book and thus feel like a recollection of a time past, which is just what they are. For me the “photo-album” feel comes from obviously their time altered coloring, but also how they were taken. Some of them look to have been taken with a consumer lever rangefinder of the day (40mm Canonet?) and even look amateurish at first glance. Looking carefully you may notice Yoko in a dress or in a location from a photograph that Araki had shot in black and white, and which was on an earlier page in the book. Looking at these is like watching bonus material from a film you know well- you know what will happen, and you know what happened earlier from the earlier pictures in the book, and so these pictures serve to transform your relationship with the previous images. The black and white images work out to be “real life” while the final color shots come across as memories.
They look simple, but they are the careful creations by a very sharp witted and capable photographer. Had these pictures been spruced up and restored in photoshop and then printed in the book like any other color photos that you are used to seeing, then Araki’s clever invitation to share in his memories would be lost.
