“Tokyo Love” is a seminal collaboration between American photographer Nan Goldin and Japanese master Nobuyoshi Araki. In the spring of 1994, the two artists set out to document the “new youth” of Tokyo, capturing the joys, thrills, and anxieties of a generation living at the breakdown of orthodox social structures. The book serves as a visual dialogue: Araki presents 100 portraits of teenage girls, focusing on the transition from girlhood to womanhood with his signature obsession with eroticism and fragility. Goldin, meanwhile, explores Tokyo’s queer underground—gay boys, transvestites, and fetishists—celebrating their courage and beauty. For Goldin, the project was a “return to the garden,” a journey back to the innocence of her own adolescence before it was touched by the AIDS epidemic.
