Eros Diary is a love letter from an artist to his muse, from a husband to his wife, from the living to the dead, using the photograph as the vehicle to speak a thousand words in every language without ever opening his mouth. Eros Diary is Nobuyoshi Araki’s new exhibition of 77 black-and-white photographs on view at Anton Kern Gallery, NY, now through August 7, 2015. It is an incredible collection of work that is deeply introspective, the portrait of a soul, if you will. Eros Diary reminds us of the countless ways Araki continues to be one of the greatest photographers working today.
In an interview with Nan Goldin in 1995, Araki observed, “Photography was destined to be involved with death. Reality is in color, but at its beginnings photography always discolored reality and turned it into black and white. Color is life, black and white is death. A ghost was hiding in the invention of photography.”
Araki’s insight is chilling for it articulates something we sense but cannot speak. It is the presence of death in life, its constancy, it’s closeness that reminds us in our waking hours as well as in our dreams. It is this closeness that Araki captures in Eros Diary, this reflection of recent personal traumatic events including the loss of his beloved cat, Chiro, his fight with prostate cancer, and later, the loss of vision in his right eye.
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But it is also the constant, on-going presence of loss that makes Eros Diary a letter of love to the woman who was closest to his soul. Each photograph is time-stamped “15 7 7” in reference to Araki’s anniversary of his marriage to his wife Yoko, who died in 1990. This date also coincides with the Chinese Qixi Festival, also known as the Tanabata Festival in Japan, a celebration of the annual meeting of “The Cowherd and Weaver Girl,” an ancient Chinese folktale where two forbidden lovers reunite once a year for a single night.
By including the time-stamp in his work, Araki reminds us that their union endures even though she has left the earthly plane, but continues to inspire her soulmate in the creation of his art. Here, in Eros Diary, we witness Araki’s life as he continues to work through advanced age, illness, and loss, continuing to explore and discover the beauty, joys, and sorrows of the world. One of the most prolific photographers of all time, with over 400 published books and 280 solo shows worldwide, Araki himself is a force of nature, as his photographs so reveal.
The photographs selected for Eros Diary are a record of daily life, each moment preserved in an exquisite black-and-white print that, as Araki explained, was also a moment of death. Each photograph offers a space to contemplate what has come before and no longer exists, but for this single frame of time and space. It is in this sliver of life that Araki shows us the complexities of an existence that is forever foreshadowing death, an eternal circle that love and only love can truly transcend.
