Araki: Bondage
Taschen's book of Araki Nobuyoshi's kinbaku photographs, issued in 2012 as a signed three-volume limited edition and later as a single hardcover.
Araki: Bondage is a book of photographs by Araki Nobuyoshi, a photographer born in Tokyo in 1940 who, according to his publisher, has published more than 400 books. Taschen issued it as a selection of the pictures Araki considers his favorites from his long work on kinbaku-bi, which the publisher translates as “the beauty of tight binding” and calls one of his most important subjects.
The book first appeared as a limited edition: three volumes hand-bound in the Japanese manner and packed in a wooden box, 600 pages in all, in 845 numbered copies signed by Araki, plus three art editions of 50 copies each that came with a print. AnOther Magazine reported in August 2012 that the set would go on sale that September,. Taschen later released the selection as a single 288-page hardcover; its page for that edition gives no date.
Taschen’s description presents the photographs as walking the line between art and pornography and notes that Araki’s work has met controversy and censorship, especially in Japan. Daisy Woodward’s article for AnOther places the book in the history of erotic bondage in Japan, which she traces from the late Edo period to the bondage photographs of 1950s magazines such as Kitan Club.