The Guimet Museum in Paris is presenting "POLARAKI," a groundbreaking exhibition featuring a thousand Polaroid photographs by renowned Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki. The show, running from October 1, 2025, to January 12, 2026, showcases an essential aspect of Araki's work through his exploration of the infinite possibilities offered by Polaroid photography, which has been a central source of experimentation in the artist's practice.
Araki Nobuyoshi, a prolific, obsessive, and deliberately provocative Japanese photographer, has been an essential protagonist in Japanese and international photography history since the 1960s. The exhibition stems from an exceptional donation received by the Guimet Museum, revealing the artist's intensive use of instant photography as both an artistic medium and a form of visual diary.
The Polaroids featured in the exhibition, created between 1997 and 2024, were progressively acquired from predominantly French and Japanese galleries over the past 25 years by collector Stéphane André. André donated his entire collection to the Guimet Museum on May 5, 2025, significantly contributing to the museum's enrichment policy in contemporary Asian art and photography.
The exhibition is installed in the museum's fourth-floor rotunda, presenting the installation originally conceived by the collector for his apartment in Paris's 18th arrondissement. The display consists of 43 columns composed of 9 frames arranged edge to edge from floor to ceiling. Each frame contains one, two, three, or four Polaroids, arranged according to associations created partly by Araki and partly by the collector.
The exhibition pays tribute to Araki's frantic use of Polaroid photography, which has constituted an almost daily practice for him since the late 1990s. This medium serves his scopophilic and erotic impulses, feeding into a form of visual journal around which his entire body of work revolves. The show demonstrates how instant photography functions as his attempt to capture a stream of consciousness, anticipating contemporary usage where image production and distribution collide continuously.
The display also evokes the appropriation of an artist's work by a private collector in a form reminiscent of curiosity cabinets. These are characterized by the saturation of personal space, a taste for the strange or even the licentious, and their eclectic nature. This approach reflects the collector's personal relationship with Araki's provocative and intimate imagery.
Born in Tokyo in 1940, Nobuyoshi Araki has been working in Japan since the early 1960s. After studying photography, he joined the advertising firm Dentsu in 1963 before becoming an independent photographer in 1972. He quickly achieved considerable artistic success and great popularity both in Japan and on the international scene.
The eroticized staging of the female body occupies a central place in his work, sometimes compared to shunga prints and the practice of binding bodies (shibari, kinbaku). This is combined with close-up shots of flowers and images from his familiar universe: landscape elements, urban environment, skies, cats, figurines, dolls, and food remains. His photographic production is largely fed by his personal history, as Araki developed a new genre he calls "shi-shashin" (I-photography) – a first-person visual writing between fiction and autobiography.
Araki's work is obsessively haunted by love, sex, life, death, and controversially, the female body. His practice maintains strong affinities with certain artistic avant-gardes of the 1960s and 1970s, from pop art (media attention, provocation, complicity with popular culture) to experimental photography (interventions on Polaroids with scissors, brushes, or felt-tip pens).
The exhibition is curated by Cécile Dazord, curator and mission leader for contemporary art at the Guimet Museum, and Édouard de Saint-Ours, curator of photographic collections at the Guimet Museum. This exceptional donation extends the work initiated in 2016 with the monographic retrospective "Araki" exhibition presented at the Guimet Museum.
Due to their sexually explicit nature, some photographs in the exhibition may shock certain audiences. Access to the rotunda is prohibited for visitors under 18 years old. Tickets are priced at €13 for general admission and €10 for reduced rates, with reservations available online at www.guimet.fr. The Guimet Museum is located at 6 Place d'Iéna in Paris's 16th arrondissement.
