Unveiling Desire: Japanese Photographers Who Redefined Sexuality
Author: Kotryna Misiūnė
In the aftermath of World War II, Japan’s photographic scene was reborn. As the country rebuilt, a new generation of photographers moved beyond neutral documentary styles to explore identity, social change and the human body. By the 1960’s, photography scene turned into a space for bold experimentation, laying the groundwork for contemporary Japanese art. As photographers tested how far images could venture into private or forbidden territory, sexuality emerged as a powerful theme in this period of flux.
Desire shifted from the margins to the very heart of photographic practice. Creators embraced erotic imagery—from intimate close-ups to shadowy, taboo spaces—treating sexuality as a deliberate focus rather than a mere flourish. These works went beyond provocation, probing questions of power, ritual and mortality as Japan balanced age-old traditions with rapid modernization.
Such spirit gave rise to what we now call the golden age of post-war Japanese photography. Half a century on, artists still push into bedrooms, bars and public corners once considered off-limits, turning private pleasure into shared stories. What follows is a closer look at some of the most prominent Japanese photographers who placed the body at the center of their vision—proving how images can unsettle, challenge and ultimately redefine intimacy in modern Japan.
1. Nobuyoshi Araki, known as Arākii (b. 1940):
Nobuyoshi Araki is one of Japan’s most prolific and, at the same time, most disputed photographers. He belongs to the generation of artists that surfaced in the 1960s, when rapid post-war growth and urbanisation were reshaping Japanese life.
Araki’s pictures often echo national history and traditions. Street corners, flowers, food, faces, and even his cat Chiro appear again and again. Above all, he is known for photographing women bound with Kinbaku ropes—the Japanese art of erotic bondage that originated in the 15th century. For Araki, these images link sexuality and mortality, as these are major themes in his work.
Araki is arguably one of the most productive photographers, holding more than 500 photobooks under his belt. Turning everyday experiences into an unending visual record, he published the celebrated photobook Sentimental Journey (1972-1992), in which he documented daily life with his late wife Aoki Yōko, from their honeymoon through her final illness, mixing ordinary moments with private intimacy.
Araki was also among the first Japanese artists to show pubic hair openly, defying local obscenity laws and facing several arrests. Even so, his work—Polaroids included—has been exhibited worldwide and is held in major contemporary art collections as well as in permanent displays at a number of contemporary art museums.
2. Eikoh Hosoe (1933–2024)
Eikoh Hosoe stands among Japan’s most influential post-war photographers, celebrated for his famous collaborations and black-and-white photographs in high-contrast style. Drawing on mythology, metaphor and symbolism, he fused photography with theatre, dance, film and traditional Japanese art, pushing the medium beyond strict photography boundaries.
Hosoe first drew attention in the late 1950s with close-ups of the human body, then sealed his reputation through extended partnerships with leading cultural figures. Barakei (Ordeal by Roses, 1963) transforms novelist Yukio Mishima into a baroque icon of beauty and martyrdom, while Kamaitachi (1969) places butoh dancer Tatsumi Hijikata in rural landscapes to craft a visual parable about desire, violence and death. Issued as photobooks, these series defined Hosoe’s theatrical, high-contrast artistic style.
Hosoe pursued the body’s mysteries further in Embrace (1969–1970), where male and female nudes dissolve into near-abstract forms, and in Simon: A Private Landscape (1971), which explores identity through ritual performance. Across all his work, Hosoe’s psychologically charged images probe themes of erotic obsession, mortality and the irrationality.
Today this iconic photographer’s work is shown worldwide and held in major public and private collections, confirming his place in the global history of visual art.
3. Kohei Yoshiyuki (1946–2022)
Kohei Yoshiyuki shook Japanese photography in the 1970s with his black-and-white pictures of couples engaging in sexual activities in Tokyo’s parks. Back then Yoshiyuki noticed that, after dark, the city’s neatly kept lawns where no longer relaxing family retreats, but rather spaces where couples met for sexual encounters—and where groups of spectators gathered, hidden in the bushes, to watch or even join in. These scenes veiled in darkness, and the line between watcher and participant all but disappeared.
Yoshiyuki spent months perfecting techniques and equipment to document these hidden sexual encounters of both homosexual and heterosexual couples. Scouting through Shinjuku Central Park, Yoyogi Park, and Aoyama Park in downtown Tokyo, he used a 35mm camera, infrared film, and flash to capture numerous provoking and discomfiting moments of intimacy between 1971 and 1979. Published as The Park (1979), the series confronts viewers with voyeurism, privacy and the forbidden thrill of observing others unseen.
Prints from The Park have entered major museum collections and continue to appear in exhibitions worldwide, confirming the work’s enduring capacity to unsettle and provoke.
4. Kishin Shinoyama (1940–2024)
Kishin Shinoyama became one of Japan’s most well-known and celebrated photographers, who earned his broad recognition through daring female nudes. From the debut book Nude (1970)—a 108-page portfolio of female nudes photographed everywhere from Death Valley to central Tokyo—Shinoyama placed intimacy and the human body at the centre of his photographic practice.
Shinoyama often photographed actresses and pop idols, becoming a leading figure in Japan’s gurabia (eng. gravure) culture – a genre of magazine imagery that showcases women in suggestive, semi-nude poses. In the mid-1970s, he produced weekly “Gekisha” column for Goro magazine, spotlighting popular idols as his models; eventually, these images were compiled as the blockbuster photobook Gekisha: 135 Female Friends (1979).
Shinoyama persistently tested Japan’s obscenity limits. Pygmalionisme (1985) showed Simon Yotsuya’s hyper-real dolls with visible pubic hair, and Tokyo Nude (1990) placed unclothed models on empty Tokyo streets, thrusting sexuality into public space.
Soon after that, the peak came in: Water Fruit (1991) portrayed actress Kanako Higuchi in full-frontal studies, while Santa Fe (1991) featured teen idol Rie Miyazawa with pubic hair—still taboo in Japan’s mainstream media. Nevertheless, selling more than 1.5 million copies, Santa Fe became Japan’s best-selling photobook and ignited a nationwide boom in explicit celebrity photobooks.
Across five decades, Shinoyama’s photographs have used the nude body to explore intimacy, fame and the boundaries of Japanese censorship.
5. Hajime Sawatari (b. 1940)
Hajime Sawatari began in fashion before turning to richly colored, narrative photobooks that weave childhood fantasy with adult desire. In 1973 he launched two defining works: Nadia, a diary of his romantic summer travels with Italian model Nadia Galli through beaches, hotel rooms and Sicilian ruins that won the Nendō-shō prize, and Alice, a surreal retelling of Alice in Wonderlan. The latter portrayed the full-frontal photographs of a pre-teen girl; at the time it sparked a storm of debate over where to draw the line between artistic expression and exploitation. Sawatari revisited fairy-tale themes in Alice from the Sea (1979) and carried his cinematic style into later sequels to Nadia, using European settings and lush color to blur reality and fantasy.
In Taste of Honey (1990), Sawatari returned to mature sensuality, pairing novelist Amy Yamada’s text with unflinching portraits of a young woman—a book that earned him the Kodansha Publishing Culture Award.
Across each project, the female body acts as both muse and storytelling device, with sexuality as the constant thread uniting his surreal, pop-inflected vision.
