The boy lent me this Araki book sometime back. It is a monster of a book with over 500 pages.

I was home again today with the cold, so what better way to spend the afternoon than reading and looking through Araki’s pictures. It has been months since I took photos, but his photos, his words make me want to get out there right now and take everything. We had watched the Arakimentri DVD last Sunday, and it was that same energy coming from him.

Anyway, a couple of quotes I really liked from the book that I think applies to life as much as it does to photography:

Nobuyoshi Araki

“Photography is life itself. It’s the starting point got life. You can’t live entirely by yourself. To be by yourself is a lonely business. No one finds life interesting in the absence of other people. That’s the way people are. More or less has nothing to do with it. We all need someone.”

“I can explain if I have to, but all the interests vanishes when you have to explain this kind of thing. It’s just not interesting because it means that all the mystery, or perhaps I might say the enigmatic quality, disappears. Without a bit of perfunctoriness, no matter how insignificant, all the interest evaporates. It’s precisely this perfunctory sense, this sense that you don’t know entirely what’s going on, that makes an artist! It’s not necessarily a good thing to be understood, and it’s this that makes the artist!”

“To keep this thing going for a long time, you just have to carry on taking photographs. By taking photographs you make discoveries about yourself and come to realize various things. If you are constantly being made aware of things, this gives you the impulse to carry on. You learn things through taking photographs; photography is your teacher. The main thing is to keep on taking photographs for ever and ever.”

And lastly on imperfect perfection:

“I often try  and take a perfect and complete picture but then at the same time deliberately add some kind of imperfection. It’s all about how to avoid taking a perfect picture. You know, there is nothing worse than perfection.

It doesn’t matter if you just go round in circles; the important thing is to feel that you’re on the move. Moving is synchronous to being alive. Coming to a halt as a result of achieving perfection is tantamount to dying. I suppose it would be a good thing to have a perfect death, but it all boils down to the fact that we really don’t know what perfection is anyway. We haven’t a clue.”