Shakyo rojin nikki (Diary of a Photo-Maniac Old Man) Nobuyoshi Araki

*Available only in Europe

One volume in Araki's ongoing Shakyō rōjin nikki ('Diary of a Photo-Maniac Old Man') series, published by Wides Shuppan. Adopting the persona of an old man crazed for photography, Araki records aging, illness, and the daily traffic of life and death. A signature gesture of the series is his scratching and defacing of his own negatives and slides, driving the image from destruction toward rebirth. Dated like a diary, the work extends his lineage of 'I-photography,' turning Tokyo's back streets, flowers, skies, and his own surroundings into a record shot through with black humor and a keen sense of mortality — an oeuvre in which sheer photographic volume itself becomes the expression of Araki's conviction that to photograph is to live.