Nobuyoshi Araki "Theater of Love"荒木経惟「愛の劇場」
"A box, about the size of a cabinet card, labelled Theater of Love. Opening it, there were about 150 photographic prints inside. They must have been taken around ʼ65. Back then, I was clicking away on an Olympus Pen F, experimenting with thermal development, fooling around with printing and film developing techniques. The photos capture me, and the women and the life and the places of that era. Seems like I already called them Theater of Love in those days. But either way - good stuff. Good photos. You canʼt get this with digital." (Nobuyoshi Araki, December 2010, from the Taka Ishii Gallery press release)
The series Theater of Love consists of around 100 photographs taken around the year 1965, when Araki was working at advertising giant Dentsu. The photos were first shown at an exhibition at Taka Ishii Gallery in February 2011.
For the opening of CASE TOKYO, Case is proud to announce an exhibition featuring each of Nobuyoshi Arakiʼs original Theater of Love prints, and the publication of the accompanying photobook Theater of Love, documenting the entire series in bookform.
The exhibition is held in cooperation with Taka Ishii Gallery and Zen Foto Gallery.
Artist
Nobuyoshi ARAKI 荒木経惟
Araki was born in Shitaya-ku (now Taito-ku), Tokyo. Araki graduated from photography faculty at Chiba University and worked at advertising agency Dentsu as an commercial photographer. Here, Araki met his future wife, an essayist Yōko Araki. After they were married in 1971, Araki published a book of pictures of his wife taken during their honeymoon titled Sentimental Journey (Yōko died in 1990). In 1972, Araki resigned from Dentsu and became a freelance photographer. His works are held in numerous museum collections including the Tate and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.