The Banquet

Nobuyoshi Araki
The Banquet

Photographs: Nobuyoshi Araki

Text: Ivan Vartanian and Jeffrey Ladd

Publisher: Errata editions

136 pages

Pictures: 67

Year: 2012

Comments: Hardcover under dust jacket, 24,7 x 18,5 cm, color photographs. In very good condition. Text in English.

As the fifteenth installment of their ‘Books on Books Project’, New York-based publisher Errata Editions re-released Nobuyoshi Araki's photobook ‘The Banquet’ (originally published by Magazine House in 1993). 'The Banquet' collects photos of the meals that 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.

About the original photobook: "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".