Nobuyoshi Araki is best known for his 1970s series of honeymoon snaps of his wife, which veer from the sweetly quotidian to the full-frontally erotic. This image, however, is very much neither of those: it’s somehow grotesque, almost surreal in its cropping and colours, humorous and strange. The shot is part of a series presented in a photobook of the same name, which shows images of food that Araki and his wife ate together in the months before her death, featuring both colour and black and white images as though narrating the trajectory from the bright hues of her pre-cancer living to the ebbing away of life into shades of grey. The story makes the image feel incredibly poignant. Araki’s image is shown alongside work by the likes of Nan Goldin, Martin Parr, Man Ray, Cindy Sherman, Wolfgang Tillmans and Weegee as part of The Photographers’ Gallery exhibition Feast for the Eyes – The Story of Food in Photography, until 9 February 2020.
