Taka Ishii Gallery Photography / Film is pleased to present “Tokyo Blues 1977,” a solo exhibition of works by Nobuyoshi Araki. “Tokyo Blues 1977” is Araki’s 21st solo exhibition at Taka Ishii Gallery and comprise 26 selected vintage prints from his solo exhibition “Tokyo Blues,” which was held at the Nikon Salon in 1977.

Documentary, photography, and the camera are all about performance. Performance is truth and it must be reproduced. Women, men, and the city are all protagonists. They all perform and live. They perform as best they can to live.
– Excerpted from Nobuyoshi Araki, ‘Petanque Araki 3,’ Camera Mainichi, April 1977

Araki, who has continuously produced very personal photographic works, produced as a result of his thick involvement with his subjects, has published books dealing with the latent fictitious nature of photographs since the 1970s. In Nobuyoshi Araki’s Pseudo – Reportage (1980), he added documentary-like, yet partly false texts to his photographic images. In Nobuyoshi Araki’s Pseudo – Diary (1980), he used the camera’s dating function to print false dates on his images. “Tokyo Blues” is a ‘made-up’ documentary that begins with a woman from Kyushu, whom Araki met. She moves from her hometown to Tokyo. Araki felt the women he encountered and their pasts were ‘blues’-like, became attached to their ‘performances,’ and ‘reproduced’ them. In his 1978 book Dramatic Shooting: Actresses he writes, “Behind the dictionary’s back, I once called women, who had a presence that was more than real, ‘actresses.’ In fact, however, all women are more than real. Each and every one of them is ‘the actual thing.’ All women are therefore actresses.”

Courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery Photography / Film