The Banquet

Nobuyoshi Araki
The Banquet

Photographs: Nobuyoshi Araki

Publisher: Magazine House

130 pages

Pictures: 60

Year: 1993

Comments: Softcover with dustjacket and obi as issued, 250 x 185 mm. First edition, 1993. Included in Martin Parr & Gerry Badger, The Photobook, vol.1. Edges of the book just a bit used, copy in very good condition.

This book documents the food that Araki and his wife ate together in the months before her death, and it is divided into color and black-and-white sections.

"The effect of each section is therefore quite different-the color is lucid, clinical, slightly repellent, the monochrome softer, more diffuse, the food less easily identified. 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 landscapes of the cancer that was destroying his wife."

From Parr and Badger, "The Photobook: A History Vol. I":