Nobuyoshi Araki is one of the most controversial and celebrated photographers in contemporary Japan. He has built his poetics around a core of impulse that manifests itself as explicitly as it does tragically intimately: Eros. In his photography, eroticism is never a simple theme or subject: it is an existential condition, a force that runs through life and death, flesh and memory, womanhood and the city of Tokyo.

In Araki’s universe, Eros is inseparable from nostalgia and impermanence. His photos of cut flowers, abandoned bodies, Tokyo skies crossed by power lines all speak of the same desire: to preserve what inevitably vanishes. In this sense, Araki is a profoundly Japanese photographer, because his aesthetic is rooted in the concept of mono no aware — the melancholy of transience. Eros, then, is not only sexual impulse but an awareness of the fragility of beauty. Photography becomes a rite of love and mourning: to love is already to lose; to shoot is like saying goodbye.

As Japan’s most famous photographer, it’s no surprise that Araki includes a multitude of celebrities among his subjects. His most notable fan, however, is perhaps the Icelandic star Björk, whom he photographed for the cover of her album Telegram in 1996. Interviewed in the documentary Arakimentari (2004), the singer recalls how she first discovered the eccentric photographer’s work in London in 1993. It was, she says, “immediately a very powerful discovery.”

Björk goes on to describe Araki as “the most energetic person I know… an artist who does everything at nine thousand percent.” In those images, the singer appears suspended between vulnerability and power, perfectly embodying the Arakian aesthetic of Eros as life force, tension, and memory. Araki does not simply portray Björk: he captures her energy, her vitality, the very urgency to live and to create that permeates all of his photographic work.

This article was created in collaboration with Luigi Falanga aka @super8otto.