Published by Silvana Editoriale in 2010, Nobuyoshi Araki’s Love and Death is an exhibition catalogue conceived on the scale of a substantial retrospective. More than 300 photographs bring together major bodies of work from across his career, including Satchin, Sentimental Journey, Winter Journey, Cityscapes Polart, Sensual Flowers and Bondage. Rather than isolating a single phase, the book places recurrent subjects and changing methods in sustained relation.

Its title names the central tension in Araki’s photography. Erotic images, flowers, urban scenes and intimate records of marriage and bereavement are sequenced within the same broad field of attention. Sentimental Journey follows his life with Yoko Araki; Winter Journey confronts her final days and death. Alongside these deeply personal works, photographs of bondage and the city expand the book’s emotional register from tenderness and grief to theatricality, desire and public life.

This breadth clarifies how Araki repeatedly makes human experience—rather than any one genre—his subject. Sensuality is not confined to the body, just as mortality is not restricted to images of loss: both emerge through shifts in context, proximity and sequence. The survey format allows motifs that may appear provocative or private in isolation to be read as parts of a longer inquiry into attachment, impermanence and the act of photographing everyday existence.

For collectors, the importance of Love and Death rests in that editorial range. The 400-page, Italian-English first bilingual edition offers a structured overview of several defining cycles in one publication, while retaining the contrasts on which Araki’s work depends. As an exhibition catalogue associated with the Museo d’Arte della Città di Lugano, it records a specific institutional framing of an unusually prolific bookmaker: not a simplified summary, but a dense cross-section of a career built through books, series and recurring encounters with intimacy.