Photographing subjects as diverse as flowers, kinbaku (the Japanese art of rope-tying), and Tokyo street scenes, Nobuyoshi Araki continues to astound viewers with a plethora of beautiful and provocative images. Themes of love, sex, death, consumption, natural beauty, and femininity, have inspired Araki since his days as a student of film and photography in the early 1960's. Never willing to compromise his sometimes outrageous vision, Araki uses photography to record and elaborate his visceral emotional reactions to everyday encounters with life and death: “Photography is about a single point of a moment. It’s like stopping time. As everything gets condensed in that forced instant. But if you keep creating these points, they form a line which reflects your life.” Born in Tokyo in 1940, Nobuyoshi Araki has been active in publishing, photography and filmmaking since his Japanese solo debut exhibition in 1965. Particularly renowned exhibitions of his include those held at The Cartier Foundation, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, and the Museum of Sex, New York. Araki has been the recipient of the Austrian Decoration of Honor for Science and Arts and the 54th Mainichi Art Award.