Nobuyoshi Araki
PROJECT Book Design DESIGN Concept / Book / Communication Materials / Exhibition / Campaign CLIENT Steidl, Göttingen / C/O Berlin Foundation, Berlin / Germany

Nobuyoshi Araki is regarded as one of the most influential and controversial photographers of his generation. He approaches nudity, sexuality and the body with radical directness. His images are defined by proximity — emotional, physical and spatial. It is precisely this absence of distance that makes them at once intimate, affecting and unsettling. The design of the book is deliberately restrained. It creates space for the photographs and allows their intensity to speak largely for itself. The cover is the exception. The image originally chosen was considered too radical for display on a book table. Rather than replace it, a transparent dust jacket was introduced. It overlays the image, softens the first encounter and turns the tension between revealing and concealing into part of the design concept.