Nobuyoshi Araki

My initial reaction to his work is to be stunned how blunt it is and he's simply having sex with his clients. The images appear to be informal because it looks as though it is ambient light used. It makes me question if this is used as art or an excuse to have sex with naive models. It's clear that his work is considered controversial and I can imagine that his work was often ridiculed and discarded as sexism.

            The meaning or purpose for these images are, I feel, very vague. It is difficult to have an educated guess as to what the meaning might be. After asking a student what they feel is the meaning, to which he thought that maybe his work was to express his own fetishes and sexual desires with no regard to sexism. I find it very objectifying to women amongst a lot of other people who have reviewed his work. Some images varie in how some look very professional in that they have clearly been done in a studio with flash and other look less professional with ambient light and a very low quality.

                  Because some images appear to be professional and others not, this is visible when it comes to the colour. Some images have a very high contrast with both true blacks and true whites. However others are very soft with lots of greys. This has an effect on visual language in that the ones with a high contrast appear to very elegant and more pressional, whereas the photographs that are soft appear unprofessional and look more so the subject are of a lower class. Most of his photographs are in black and white, this gives a quite dark and gloomy atmosphere to the images.

                 I personally feel that his work is very objectifying. It seems as though he has used the idea of being a professional photographer to sleep with and use these models, taking advantage of naive models. It's easy to understand why his work is controversial and subject to a lot of criticism.