POLARAKI – Thousand Polaroids by Araki Nobuyoshi at Musée Guimet

A prolific, obsessive and deliberately provocative photographer, Araki Nobuyoshi has been a key figure in the history of Japanese and international photography since the 1960s.

Overview

Produced between 1997 and 2024, the Polaroids by Araki presented in the exhibition were gradually acquired from mainly French and Japanese galleries over the last 25 years by collector Stéphane André, who donated them to the Guimet Museum on May 2025. Displayed in the rotunda on the fourth floor of the museum, POLARAKI presents the installation designed by the collector for his apartment: 43 columns composed of 9 frames arranged edge to edge from floor to ceiling. Each frame is composed of one, two, three or four Polaroids, arranged in combinations chosen partly by Araki and partly by the collector.

The exhibition pays tribute to Araki's frenetic use of Polaroid photography, which has been an almost daily ritual for him since the late 1990s, serving his scopic and erotic impulses and fuelling a kind of diary around which his entire body of work revolves.

It also evokes the appropriation by a private collector of an artist's work in a form reminiscent of cabinets of curiosities – characterised by the saturation of a personal space, a taste for the strange and even the licentious, and a heterogeneous nature.

Stéphane André's exceptional donation to the Guimet is a significant contribution to the museum's policy of enriching its collections in the fields of contemporary Asian art and photography. It continues the work begun in 2016 with the Araki retrospective exhibition presented at the Guimet in 2016.

The exhibition is curated by Cécile Dazord (Curator, Project Manager for Contemporary Art, Guimet Museum) and Édouard de Saint-Ours (Curator of Photographic Collections, Guimet Museum).