ABCD
Nobuyoshi Araki
ABCD is a facsimile of Araki’s four oversize notebooks lettered thus, which house enlarged contact prints from 94 rolls of film made by him in the early '70s; each is numbered and sequenced in chronological order.
The developer used to develop these negatives was overheated, causing the emulsion to reticulate and break apart in random fashion. The physical, degenerative effect on the images, lends itself to existential interpretation as if they had survived the blast. The reservoir of images is extracted from everyday life and in essence chronicles Araki’s experience. There is little epiphany in the interpretation of subject matter, shifting from generic urban landscape to sexual acts. The marriage of the mundane and the erotic is at the core of Araki’s canon, and here, in 1972, he is laying the conceptual foundation for all future work.
Price on request
PPP Editions, 2003
Limited edition of 20 copies, signed and numbered.
Oblong folio; black-and-white photographs; stiff-printed wrappers; spiral bound; four volumes housed in a cardboard box.
︎︎︎ Exhibition
