Polart: Araki

Nobuyoshi Araki
Polart
Rat Hole Gallery, 2009
Hardcover, 512 pp
17.5 x 25 cm
Edition of 1,500
Text in Japanese

Released in conjunction with Araki’s Polart 6000 exhibition at Rat Hole Gallery, this dense volume brings together over 2,000 Polaroids in one of his most complete presentations of the medium. Erotic, obsessive, and diaristic, Polart offers a window into the artist’s compulsive image-making practice—one that blurs the line between the personal and performative.

The sequencing is relentless, with the intimacy of the Polaroid format amplifying Araki’s visual language: bodies, bondage, flowers, mourning, memory. Each image is a fragment—tender, raw, and immediate.

Out of print and increasingly hard to source, Polart stands as one of the essential late-career Araki books, capturing the ephemeral nature of desire and photography in equal measure.