Shokuji (The Banquet). Photographs and text by Nobuyoshi Araki. Design by Katsumi Komagata. Magazine House, Tokyo, 1993. 130 pp. Quarto. Stiff wrappers. Photo-illustrated dust jacket. Printed obi. 32 black-and-white and 28 color reproductions.
Among the most desirable of Araki's several hundred books! "Shokuji (The Banquet) is another tribute to Nobuyoshi Araki's late wife Yoko...A 'photo-diary' of the food they ate together in the last months of her life, the book is divided into three sections. Two parts are double-page photographic spreads of food, enclosing a middle section that is a written 'food diary'...Araki was making commercial food pictures on a regular basis, and the color section of the book represents a selection of these, beginning in 1985, and shot with ring flash and a macro lens. The black-and-white section was photographed using available room light at home, and was started when doctors told Araki that his wife had only around a month left to live...The obvious metaphor is to suggest that the color was leaving Araki's world, but his intentions are not quite so simple. The retreat from color is a retreat from realism to romanticism, where what were clearly images of food now become images of matter, like micro-photography, echoing the viral landscape of the cancer that was destroying his wife."--Parr & Badger, The Photobook, A History, vol. I
Fine in Fine dust jacket; slight edge wear to obi. |
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