Books on Books Vol.15 “The Banquet”

Nobuyoshi Araki’s “Shokuji” (The Banquet) is a tribute to his late wife Yoko through a ‘photo-diary’ of the food they shared together in the last months of her life. Resembling brightly colored commercial food pictures made with a ring flash and a macro lens, and contrasted with bleak black-and-white images he photographed at home after doctors told Araki that his wife had only a month left to live, it presents Araki’s deeply personal diary of loss in its entirety along with an essay by Ivan Vartanian.