Between 1963 and 1972, photographer Nobuyoshi Araki took the subway to work. Always with his cameras, even back then, he began to take pictures of those who sat opposite him.
"People plunk themselves down," he now remembers, "and act out their lives -- all different -- for you." He was interested in the idea of the random encounter, and "if you just keep on looking at a person, for a long time, there's always something." Sometimes he let the other person know he was photographing them, which resulted in what Roland Barthes has called "the instant pose." Mostly he did not. Camera in his lap he did not even use the view finder, resulting in lopped off bodies and strange but interesting compositions.
In this way he captured many people, including by accident his own mother (p. 110 of this edition). He began to think of the subway car as his studio, and then -- looking at the anonymous if interesting people -- as "a transport car for prisoners."
One can see why. Photography is acquisition, a surrogate possession. Susan Sontag has written of this aspect of photography. It is reflected in the very words we use. You "capture" a person, you "load" the camera, then you "aim" it, then you "shoot" the picture. "A camera," she says, "is sold as a predatory weapon -- one that's as automated as possible, ready to spring."
She then interestingly continues: "To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have, it turns people into objects."
Given the aggressiveness of those pictures for which Araki is most famous (bound, naked girls), one can understand the attractions of masses of individuals daily available to his rapacious lens.
However, in the interview that accompanies this collection of photos, he does not think of it in this way. He says that "with photos, the fatal weakness is that everything's stopped, it's a still image." He remembers that one definition of death is "stopped breath." This he says he does not want.
Rather, he wants to stop the people but still "give the sense that they are alive and moving around." His way, he says, is to take his pictures, then make a book of them and show it to someone else. "Then I'm turning the past tense into the present tense." He takes the frozen past and makes it move.
This is because "a person's whole life can be expressed in a simple mannerism or gesture . . . it means they're alive. Any expression will do. They're alive and that's enough."
When he realized this, the idea of the subway as a transport for prisoners receded and Araki came up with a new title for his proposed collection. This was when he hit upon "Subway Love."
Originally he liked it because, with his "lousy" English pronunciation, "love" came out "rub," and this is what subway people invariably and helplessly do. Later, however, he thought that "maybe I've got love inside me, maybe I'm less interested in the bad or ugly side of people."
Maybe so, but one facet of this overwhelming collection of people sitting in the subway is that Araki has given us an almost indigestible slice of humanity. We are on the edge of sociology, maybe even anthropology, because as Sontag has affirmed, to take a photograph is to participate in another person's mortality, vulnerability, mutability.
By slicing and freezing in this manner, Araki has testified to what Sontag has called "time's relentless melt." All photographs are memento mori. The first of these were taken 43 years ago and many of the originals of these images are no more.
Araki would not agree. "I think it's my best collection ever," he says. Admiring its rawness, its vitality, he decided to print its pages from the contact sheets themselves, enlarging single frames when they deserved it. (Which is why the book is the same size as a contact sheet, a horizontal 25.4 x 20.32 cm.)
It is possible to view these hundreds of faces as a form of taxidermy, but Araki would think otherwise. "Everyone's alive; everyone's OK. They're not alone in this world. They're gonna meet with someone somehow. It's not about love, but some sort of encounter is just around the corner."
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