NOBUYOSHI ARAKI / Tokyo Lucky Hole

Nobuyoshi Araki
Tokyo Lucky Hole, 1990
Softcover with original publisher's obi, 269 pages
22 x 15cm
Ohta Shuppan, Tokyo

Condition: Near Fine. Complete with the original publisher's obi. Light rubbing and a few faint surface marks to the covers, with minor edge and corner wear consistent with age. Gentle toning to the text block as expected. Binding remains tight and square, with a clean, bright interior free from inscriptions or significant defects. An excellent collector's copy of this increasingly scarce first edition.

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Published in 1990, Tokyo Lucky Hole occupies a singular place in the history of the Japanese photobook. Produced between 1983 and 1985 in Tokyo's underground sex clubs and "image clubs", the series documents a world of performance, intimacy and desire that was rarely seen, even within Japan. Neither straightforward documentary nor staged fiction, the photographs occupy the ambiguous territory that defines so much of Araki's practice.

Issued by Ohta Shuppan at the height of Japan's economic bubble, Tokyo Lucky Hole brings together one of Araki's most uncompromising bodies of work in a dense sequence of colour and black-and-white photographs. Raw, unsettling and unexpectedly tender, the book reflects his ability to collapse the boundaries between public and private life, exposing the rituals, fantasies and contradictions of contemporary Tokyo with characteristic directness.

Increasingly scarce in its original first edition, Tokyo Lucky Hole remains one of the most compelling records of Tokyo's underground culture during the final years of the bubble economy, and an essential publication within the history of the Japanese photobook.