Nobuyoshi Araki photographed practically everything: sex, bound women, flowers, the streets of Tokyo and even the death of the person he loved. But reducing his work to erotic provocation means ignoring one of the most interesting contradictions in his photography.

In 1971 he published Sentimental Journey, a photographic diary of his honeymoon with his wife Yoko. The images tell of a disarming intimacy, made of everyday gestures, bodies and private moments. A love that Araki seems to want to preserve through every shot. In 1990 Yoko dies. Araki also photographs her illness, her final days and the funeral. Those images make up Winter Journey, where photography becomes a way of confronting something he cannot control: loss.

Araki himself has said that Sentimental Journey, initially devoted to the honeymoon, appeared to him in retrospect as the beginning of a journey toward death. As if, behind those images of love, the awareness of an inevitable loss was already present. But alongside this sentimental dimension there is an Araki obsessed with desire, eroticism and kinbaku, the Japanese art of rope bondage. Immobilized women, exposed bodies, compositions in which sensuality and constraint coexist. Images that continually call into question the boundary between intimacy, desire and possession.

And it is precisely here that love and control seem to meet. For Araki, photographing also means holding on. A body, a moment, a person destined inevitably to change or disappear. Perhaps sex and death, in his photographs, are not two such distant obsessions. Both tell of the impossible attempt to possess what, sooner or later, we are forced to let go.

This article was produced in collaboration with Luigi Falanga aka @superottomag