Nobuyoshi Araki, who has long attained world fame as the most important living Japanese photographer, was born son of a shoe seller in the Japanese prefecture Tokyo (Minowa) in 1940.
In 1959 he began to study photography and film at the Tokyo Chiba University and graduated in 1963. In the following Nobuyoshi Araki was initially working in the advertising industry for some time, but as early as by the mid- 1960s his obsession for photography became completely unfold and Nobuyoshi Araki spent hours making photographs every day.
The career of Nobuyoshi Araki, who deeply admired Jean-Luc Godard and Henri Cartier-Bresson, began with children's portraits, lyrical still lifes and shots of flowers. He also made conceptually perceived photographs in the 1970s. Nobuyoshi Araki earned international acclaim as photographer of acts and erotic scenes. Especially his provocative and at the same time poetic images with bound women consolidate his fame and make Nobuyoshi Araki one of the most controversially discussed contemporary artists in Japan. With this widely noticed group of works, Nobuyoshi Araki also pursues a tradition of his homeland - he refers to the highly erotic woodcuts from the Japanese Edo period ("Shunga").
Nobuyoshi Araki has long become a brandname: In 1976 he opened the "Nobuyoshi Araki School", in 1981 the "Araki Limited Stock Company". Around 400 book publications accompany his career. Works by Nobuyoshi Araki have been presented to the public on countless international exhibitions. In Germany shows at the Hamburg Deichtorhallen (1998 and 2010) or the exhibition in Munich's Pinakothek der Moderne (2006) are noteworthy. Nobuyoshi Araki lives and works in Tokyo.