The story reads like fiction. One day, the Guimet Museum receives an improbable email. A certain Stéphane André wishes to bequeath his collection. This professor of French and philosophy indicates he possesses nearly a thousand polaroids by the notorious Japanese photographer Araki Nobuyoshi, born in 1940. A treasure he had covered the walls of his apartment with, “hidden from view,” from floor to ceiling.
“We visited his apartment for the first time in December,” recounts Cécile Dazord, curator in charge of contemporary art collections at the National Museum of Asian Arts, which had already devoted a retrospective to Araki in 2016. “We were astonished by the scope of the collection and the collector’s rigour.”
A windfall for the institution, which until then counted only a single print by the artist. “Before entering the Guimet Museum in May 2025, the polaroids that Stéphane André patiently acquired from 1997 to 2024 had never left his home,” she continues. “Only a few close friends or the gallery owners from whom he regularly made acquisitions knew of his approach.”
A cabinet of curiosities
By recreating the collector’s installation from his Parisian studio, in the form of a mosaic of raw, colorful snapshots, “POLARAKI” highlights both the artist’s polaroid work and its appropriation by a private individual. The immersive scenography resembles a cabinet of curiosities, characterized by the saturation of personal space and a taste for the strange.
“Once I started collecting the polaroids, it soon became necessary to frame them for conservation reasons and also to enshrine certain juxtapositions,” Stéphane André explains. “The ones most precious to me were made by Araki himself, when I was able to get hold of them. Then sometimes I would make my own juxtapositions, inspired by his vision.”
It was through flowers that Stéphane André, himself a gardener, became passionate about Araki. “I came across a book, an anthology of his flower photos. This would have been in the late 1990s. I’d never seen flowers photographed in that way. This was the inner life of flowers. They were like people.”
Flowers of evil
Lily pistils, orchid corollas, turgescent buds. Araki photographed flowers like sex organs, on the border between poetry and obscenity. The floral metaphor, far from softening the licentious character of the original object, multiplies its effect tenfold. “The flower is a plant’s sexual organ, its eros. That’s what is brought to the fore,” the collector notes. “The obscenity is all the more extreme, in my view.”
From petals to skin, there is but a thread. With a cord, the artist binds flower stems and ties the bodies of his models with crimson lips. The polaroid catalyzes the photographer’s obsessions. “Araki says that the distinguishing feature of the polaroid is his ‘humidity’, as he calls it. It’s an image straight out of the developing bath, the imagination, whose refreshness is unequalled, with its colours and its vignetted corners.”
The collection illustrates Araki’s frenetic use of instant photography, which for him has constituted, since the late 1990s, an almost daily gesture, serving an erotic pulsion. “He is one with his camera,” the donor enthuses. “The shutter-click is the heartbeat, the urgent, immediate scopic impulse towards this other.”
Foodporn Araki-style
Araki photographed everything, eroticized everything: women, flowers, and even his food scraps. In an aesthetic that today would be called food porn, a neologism contracting the terms “food” and “pornography,” he immortalized in close-up the running yolk of his soft-boiled eggs, overtly phallic bananas, or a slice of watermelon.
These food polaroids are among Stéphane André’s favorites. “I know that some people find them repulsive: the food is photographed at close quarters and we’re not used to looking at it for its own sake. But I think those photos are special. Aesthetically they’re very beautiful, and the way that he juxtaposes them is done in an extremely poetic way that reflects their immanence: food is reality, in flesh and bone.”
Araki played with heterogeneous associations. “When he juxtaposes a photo of a piece of meat, marbled with streaks of white fat, with a sky strewn with clouds, it’s extraordinary. Suddenly, you have this collision between the very immediate and the infinitely distant.” Further on, the artist staged his plastic Godzilla figurine, his avatar, biting until blood a muse taking a bath, snails in her hair.
Eros and Thanatos
“In his juxtapositions you can see not only a powerful poetry but also humour, a kind of ongoing self-mockery,” the collector assures. A provocateur, did Araki not take pleasure in recounting that, upon emerging from his mother’s womb, he would have turned around to photograph her vagina? His obsession with the subjugated female body has, however, been controversial.
His images of women bound according to kinbaku techniques, in particular, can be disturbing. The tone of Araki’s works evolved after his wife’s death in 1992, notes Cécile Dazord, for whom “the reference to this type of imagery proceeding from a male gaze leaving little room for female subjectivity invites a critical reassessment.”
Stéphane André defends a more nuanced reading: “Photographing kinbaku is the staging of vulnerability. I can see a great deal of empathy in the way that this vulnerability is portrayed. And it is a projection of himself. What’s really at play is his reverence for the model. What we’re looking at here is a kind of absolute worship.”
Dancing with the dead
Among the 906 polaroids, it is an image of a different nature that catches Cécile Dazord’s attention. An image “rephotographed by Araki.” “Outdoors, against a mountainous landscape, an unusual character appears: long black robe with kimono sleeves, disheveled hair, face made up in white, eyes heavily lined in black, arms raised like a candelabra.”
Upon inquiry with Elise Voyau, historian of Japanese photography, this would be Maro Akaji, Araki’s contemporary and disciple of Hijikata Tatsumi, founder of butoh. This clue invites us to reconsider his work in the context of the Japanese avant-garde of the 1960s-70s, according to the curator. “With this discreet reference, Araki situates himself in a lineage with this demanding and subversive practice.”
Beyond the provocateur emerges another face of Araki, subtle and deeply referenced. That of an avant-garde photographer drawing from the sources of secular Japan.
“POLARAKI”, A Thousand Polaroids by Araki Nobuyoshi is on view until January 12, 2026 at the Guimet Museum, National Museum of Asian Arts, in Paris. No admission under 18.
