POLARAKI: NOBUYOSHI ARAKI’S POLAROIDS AT GUIMET MUSEUM 2025
“For Nobuyoshi Araki, photography has never been a neutral act — it is obsession, intimacy, provocation. This autumn, Paris’s Guimet Museum presents POLARAKI, an exhibition of nearly one thousand Polaroids that chart the Japanese master’s daily life, erotic fixations, and poetic encounters with mortality.”
POLARAKI: Nobuyoshi Araki’s Thousand Polaroids at the Guimet MuseumFew photographers have unsettled, provoked, and seduced audiences quite like Nobuyoshi Araki. Since the 1960s, the Tokyo-born artist has blurred the boundaries between intimacy and exhibitionism, between the poetic and the pornographic. His imagery has been called obsessive, erotic, transgressive, but also deeply human. This autumn, Paris’s Guimet Museum stages a landmark exhibition — POLARAKI (1 October 2025 – 12 January 2026) — bringing together nearly one thousand of Araki’s Polaroids in a dizzying visual diary of love, sex, life, and death.
POLARAKI: NOBUYOSHI ARAKI’S POLAROIDS AT GUIMET MUSEUM 2025
A Radical Diary in Instant Form
While Araki is best known internationally for his close-ups of flowers and his controversial staged nudes, the Polaroid has been central to his practice since the 1990s. Where his earlier work was carefully composed and formally experimental, the Polaroid gave him license to be chaotic, diaristic, and immediate. Every snapshot — a lover, a blossom, a drink on a table — becomes part of a stream of consciousness. Together, the images form what the artist himself once called “a continuous flow of obsession.”
What makes POLARAKI extraordinary is the scale. The exhibition draws on the collection of Stéphane André, who assembled almost one thousand Polaroids between 2000 and 2024 and donated them to the Guimet earlier this year. Displayed in monumental grids that recall cabinets of curiosity, the installation is both intimate and overwhelming — a private visual diary laid bare for public consumption.
Araki’s Paradise
At the heart of the exhibition is Araki’s Paradise, a staggering work of 906 dye diffusion prints mounted in 391 frames. Half of these combinations were composed by Araki himself; the other half were arranged by André in his Paris apartment, creating an extended dialogue between artist and collector.
The effect is hypnotic. Flowers and ropes sit beside snapshots of lovers; erotic tableaux echo images of daily ephemera; moments of tenderness jostle with stark reminders of mortality. Araki’s Polaroids bloom like petals in constant decay — fresh yet fragile, immediate yet eternal.
POLARAKI: NOBUYOSHI ARAKI’S POLAROIDS AT GUIMET MUSEUM 2025
Eroticism, Controversy, and Context
Araki’s work has always divided opinion. His representations of the female body, often entwined with ropes, kimonos, or tatami, have been praised as modern echoes of Japan’s erotic print traditions (shunga) and kinbaku rope practices. But as cultural attitudes evolve, many critics argue that these same images objectify and exploit. The Guimet acknowledges this tension by restricting access to certain rooms to visitors over 18, recognising that Araki’s erotic gaze still unsettles.
Yet POLARAKI is more than provocation. It is also a reminder of photography’s duality, at once personal and public, ephemeral and enduring. Araki’s Polaroids are acts of love and mourning, tributes to fleeting beauty, and reminders of mortality’s shadow. They sit within a lineage of Japanese I-photography (shi-shashin), where the artist’s life and art collapse into each other.
A Living Legacy
Araki’s output is staggering: more than 500 books, countless exhibitions, and now this gift of nearly a thousand Polaroids to the Guimet. For Paris, POLARAKI is not just another retrospective; it is an unveiling of an artist’s compulsive process, an immersion into an oeuvre that refuses to settle.
As viewers move through the grids of instant photographs, they are invited into a private yet universal experience: the fragility of beauty, the erotic pull of the everyday, and the inevitability of loss.
POLARAKI: A Thousand Polaroids by Araki Nobuyoshi
Guimet Museum, Paris
1 October 2025 – 12 January 2026
Entry €13 (€10 concessions) | www.guimet.fr
