"When you've lived through those three deaths, you'll be a photographer"-7

Private portrait. 

"Photography is a way of life for me. 

Araki's autobiography (ArakibyAraki) is my 40-year diary. 

Everything around it is wonderful-flowers, cats, the sky. 

A cat accompanied me, or a woman I met, and the sky was the blue sky I woke up from my dream and looked out of the lovely hotel window. 

This is my life. 

I only shoot what I like. 

I insist because my diary records every day. " 

"I observe and experience everything in the world from my point of view, and establish a kind of emotional communication and relationship with the subject. 

The concept of 'self' is important, and if you can't establish spiritual communication with the object, you certainly can't capture the true face of the object. 

This has been my theme for more than 30 years. " 

According to the Japanese literature "private novel", Araki calls his photography "private portrait". 

Indeed, his photography does not face the social reality as directly as traditional documentary photography but shows a certain degree of sociality through the high-density records of his private life. 

The sociality of his photography is reflected in his photos in a natural overflow way, rather than explicitly requiring us to watch and accept the photographer's position as documentary photography. 

Araki once said in an interview: "I am not shooting society and the times, I am shooting the people I associate with as' people of the times'. In this way, the character of the times will always come out a little bit." 

He shares highly personal images with the public to blur the boundary between private and public and turns the rendering and peeping of selfish desires into a kind of public and legitimate requirements. 

In this way, when the "private" is constantly exposed and does not become "private", the "public" also loses its relative legitimacy with the "private". 

As a result, his photography promoted the tendency to externalize selfish desires in Japanese society. 

However, the sociality in Araki's photos is often unreliable. 

Many of his works are often semi-fictional and semi-documentary. 

He not only has real-life photo albums such as "Sentimental Journey," which is based on his newly married life but also has a book titled "Romantic portraits-my Alice, "Tokyo erotic Diary of Araki," and "Araki's erotic pleasure." it shows his relationships with all kinds of women and gives people the impression of being an old hand in the love field. 

When his wife, Yoko, died of cancer in 1990, he also photographed the process before and after his wife's death, which was published as a photo album of "sentimental Journey and Winter Journey." 

In this way of sharing his private affairs with the public, he enabled himself to overcome the loneliness and fear he felt in the face of death. 

Therefore, Araki's "private portrait" has always been an open and public photography activity, and his "private portrait" has gained a kind of publicity in the continuous disclosure and dialogue with the public. 

It can be said that he is a photographer who skillfully uses "private nature" to gain publicity. 

Araki Sutra only creates a lot of visual suspense between fiction and reality, which makes people lose their sensitivity to reality and their vigilance to fiction in this specious and seemingly false picture. In this way, Araki creates a lot of visual suspense between fiction and reality, which makes people lose their sensitivity to reality and their vigilance to fiction at the same time. 

From his fiction, people may be able to find the real feeling of reality, and from his reality can get fictional artistic enjoyment. 

And all this is achieved through photography, which seems to be the most "real" medium. 

In fact, for Araki, fiction and reality have the same meaning. 

It makes no sense to dwell on which of the facts in his photos are real and which are fictional. 

Everything in his picture is real, but at the same time, it is not real. 

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In this way, he breaks the illusion of reality and cuts off the link between reality and the inevitable imagination of photography. 

And this is perhaps the greatest contribution of his photography to the discussion of "what photography is". 

In Araki's photography collection, there are many photo collections with the title "× × Diary". 

Indeed, Araki took pictures just like keeping a diary, keeping a camera in his hand every day, recording everything that happened in front of him. 

Daily life was first diluted by him in countless photos and then restored to seemingly authentic life in the form of a photo album after superb editing. 

This is his usual method of photography. 

Strictly speaking, the diary is a kind of private record, the style is free, there is no beginning, and there is no worry about how to end, the record is often stuck to the details, followed by intuition, both continuous and fragmentary, open but dense, always in a continuous tense. 

This characteristic of the diary seems to be naturally comparable to photography, which divides the world into pieces. 

And the pocket camera, which can print the date on the film at will, is a visual variant of the diary. 

While sorting out these daily fragments, he casually gives up some moments, disrupts the order of some moments, and even adjusts the recorder of the camera to the future that has not yet come. He uses this way of organizing and editing time and facts at will to edit his own life, making it true and false, and mystifying it. 

More interestingly, Araki is not afraid to make public this kind of "fiddling" with reality and has even published a photo album called "Araki's fake Diary", allowing people to share the joy of tampering with facts with him. 

His attitude towards facts touches some of the essences of photography and deconstructs the true myth of photography most intuitively. 

In a sense, his photography is not only a record of the facts he has seen but also a comment on photography itself. 

In this sense, Araki's photography is about photography.