Araki Nobuyoshi - The Banquet

First published in Japan in 1993, Nobuyoshi Araki's The Banquet (Shokuji) offers a moving tribute to the photographer's late wife, Yoko, through a photo-diary of the food they shared together in the last months of her life. The book is composed of three related sections: commercial color photographs of meals shot by Araki from 1985 onwards, using a ring flash and a macro lens; a (written) food diary; and black-and-white photographs taken at home, using only available light, a series Araki began after doctors told his wife she had only a month to live. As Martin Parr and Gerry Badger observe, "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...." This deeply personal diary of loss is here reprinted in its entirety along with an essay by Ivan Vartanian.Errata Editions' Books on Books series is an ongoing publishing project dedicated to making rare and out-of-print photography books accessible to students and photobook enthusiasts. These are not reprints or facsimiles but complete studies of the original books. Each volume in the series presents the entire content, page for page, of an original master bookwork which, up until now, has been too rare or expensive for most to experience. Through a mix of classic and contemporary titles, this series spans the breadth of photographic practice as it has appeared on the printed page and allows further study of the creation and meanings of these great works of art. Each volume in the series contains illustrations of every page in the original photobook, a new essay by an established writer on photography, production notes about the creation of the original edition and biographical and bibliographical information about each artist.
As the fifteenth instalment of their ‘Books on Books Project’, New York-based publisher Errata Editions re-released Nobuyoshi Araki's photobook ‘The Banquet’. 'The Banquet' collects photos of the meals that photographer Nobuyoshi Araki’s wife Yoko made during her last month alive. This book consists of precise reproductions of the cover and all pages from the original photobook, as well as new essays written by Ivan Vartanian and Jeffrey Ladd.

Title: The Banquet
Author: Araki Nobuyoshi | Ivan Vartanian | Jeffrey Ladd
ISBN: 9781935004295
Publisher: Errata Editions
Publication Date: 31/10/2012
Format: Hardcover
Condition: New (Sealed)