Sakiko Nomura

Sakiko Nomura was born in 1967 in Shimonoseki, Yamaguchi Prefecture. After studying photography at Kyushu Sangyo University, her official profile states that she began studying with Nobuyoshi Araki in 1991^*1. Her official book list includes Naked Room from 1994, Naked Time from 1997, Night Flight and Black Darkness from 2008, NUDE | A ROOM | FLOWERS from 2012, About Love from 2017, and Umi 1967 2022 Shimonoseki Tokyo from 2022, showing how her work around bodies, rooms, night, flowers, and her hometown has continued through photobooks^*2. Her official exhibition list shows a continuing record of presentations in Japan, Europe, and Asia since Clock without hands in 1993^*3. The shashasha artist page also summarizes her birth in Shimonoseki, graduation from Kyushu Sangyo University, study with Araki, and publications from her early years to the present^*4. To understand Nomura’s position, her relationship with Araki needs to be considered alongside Japanese nude photography after the 1960s, photobook culture after the 1970s, and the work of women photographers that became more visible in the 1990s. El País describes the Japan in which Nomura began working in the 1990s as a period of economic difficulty, but also one in which museums and galleries opened and photography collections developed^*13. Aperture’s I’m So Happy You Are Here was organized as an exhibition reconsidering Japanese women photographers from the 1950s onward, and Nomura is included in that history^*14. The Photographers’ Gallery’s 2026 exhibition similarly names Nomura among 27 artists in a show that reconstructs Japanese photographic history through women’s voices and lenses^*15. At a moment where post-Araki images of the body, the circulation of Japanese photography through photobooks, and the reassessment of women photographers overlapped, Nomura chose the male nude as a central subject. She directed it toward the relationship and time produced in the act of photographing, rather than toward the force of exposure or confession.

Postwar Nude Photography, Araki’s Eros, and 1990s Intimate Photography

A useful starting point for Nomura’s male nudes is the transformation of nude photography in postwar Japan. In the 1960s, Eikoh Hosoe photographed bodies connected to Butoh, literature, and theatricality. He shifted the nude away from an idealized artistic body and into scenes where postwar anxiety, desire, ritual, and performance intersected. SFMOMA explains that Hosoe’s major works were tied to postwar Japanese culture, poverty after the war, Japan’s ambiguous relationship with the United States, and a radical rejection of convention^*20. From the 1970s onward, Nobuyoshi Araki connected the body to the city, private life, publishing, and eros. Taka Ishii Gallery’s biography identifies eros and thanatos as central themes in Araki’s work, placing women’s bodies, bondage, flowers, food, cats, faces, and the streets of Tokyo within the same body of work^*19. The Barbican exhibition Self, Life, Death also presented Araki’s work as a large-scale photographic project spanning the self, life, and death^*18. Hosoe’s nudes pushed the body into theatrical and symbolic scenes. Araki’s nudes linked sex, death, the city, and private life through the energy of exposure. By the 1990s, intimate photography shifted attention toward bodies and everyday life seen from close range. In an interview published by Art Platform Japan, Yurie Nagashima explains that the 1990s term onna-no-ko shashin, or “girl photography,” was used to describe a movement in which young women photographed themselves, friends, and everyday life at close range, while the term itself carried prejudice and sexism^*23. Aperture’s essay on Yurie Nagashima also reads her family photographs and self-portraits as a practice that questions family, gender, youth, and institutional ways of looking^*24. In the global field of intimate photography around the same period, Nan Goldin’s The Ballad of Sexual Dependency presented lovers, friends, rooms, sex, violence, and solitude as diary-like photographs^*25. Within this shift, the nude expanded beyond an idealized body or a form of sexual provocation. It became a photograph that could show who shared what distance, what relationship, and what time of life with whom.

Where Nomura’s Male Nudes Move

Nomura’s male nudes stand near both the change in intimate photography after the 1990s and the field of eros after Araki. AWARE notes that Nomura came to regard nude photography as central to photography while she was at university, and that for her first photobook, Naked Room, she entered her subjects’ homes and photographed them one-on-one^*5. El País explains that Nomura does not reduce the act of photographing naked men to the presentation of outward appearance; it also concerns her relationship with the person and the time and place they shared^*13. The Art Newspaper presents Naked Room from 1994 as a male-nude project that shifted the sexual gaze within the visual culture that followed Araki-style “hair nude” photography^*22. Electra Magazine describes Nomura as an artist who does not define herself primarily through labels such as “woman photographer” or “female gaze.” While her male nudes unsettle conventional ways of looking, the article presents her as an artist who gives weight to the experience that photography itself receives from reality^*26. Nomura’s nudes are not limited to the reversal implied by “a woman looking at men.” Women photographers in the 1990s expanded photography by treating themselves, family, friends, lovers, rooms, travel, and chance events as realities worth photographing, while also turning the male gaze in another direction. Nomura directed that shift toward the male nude. She photographed the naked body as a trace of the brief time in which photographer and subject occupied the same place, instead of presenting it as an object of provocation or control. shashasha’s description of About Love explains that the book is composed of photographs of about 100 men taken over 20 years, and that what appears in the pictures is the distance between Nomura and her subjects, as well as something beyond romantic relationships or shared daily life^*29. JDN also describes About Love as a 400-page photobook centered on the nudes of about 100 men, noting the different encounters and relationships with each subject and the important time shared in the space of photographing^*30.

Black, Low Light, and Rooms

In Nomura’s images, black and low light pull the body away from easy explanation. AWARE describes Naked Time as an experiment using only the light available on site, such as a lamp in a room, and notes that because the light does not reach the entire room, parts of the body become dark or blurred^*5. IMA NEXT’s NIGHT states that, in places with little light, the parts that cannot be seen draw out the viewer’s imagination, and it introduces night as an essential theme in Nomura’s work^*10. In an ARTNE interview, Nomura says of her own “darkness” that she is not photographing in order to make things invisible; that is simply how her world appears to her^*28. In the same interview, she says that instead of moving to a studio to make a beautiful photograph, the photograph includes the fact that the person is there, that she is there, and that she might borrow a flashlight if necessary^*28. Nomura’s darkness is therefore not an effect used simply to hide sexual information. It is a condition that preserves the light level of the room where the subject was, the distance from the photographer, and the movement of the body without remaking the place of photographing. The 2008 work Night Flight is listed in the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum collection as a color chromogenic print^*6. The work 75 from the same year is recorded as a gelatin silver print from the Black Darkness series^*7.

Bodies, Flowers, the Sea, and Airplanes at the Same Density

In Nomura’s photobooks, flowers, the sea, night views, skies, airplanes, and rooms repeatedly appear around the male nude. In the 2025 retrospective Tender is the Night, Fundación MAPFRE describes Nomura’s black-and-white male nudes as a representative body of work, while explaining that they alternate with images of animals, still lifes, urban landscapes, meteorological phenomena, light, and shifting reflections to form a cinematic, fragmentary narrative^*12. El País also describes Night Flight as a photobook that includes grainy nocturnal male nudes, hotel rooms, clouds rising from chimneys, and airplanes taking off, and it links flowers beginning to wilt against black backgrounds to the fragility of life^*13. J Art Foundation notes that although Nomura is known for male nudes, she treats streets, objects, and everyday events as subjects of equal weight^*32. ARTNE’s introduction to the exhibition Umi describes it as a full-scale solo exhibition in Nomura’s hometown of Shimonoseki. While noting the tension and intimacy of her male nudes, it explains that the exhibition presented her world through about 150 works from her early period to the present^*33. Flowers, the sea, and airplanes are not decorative elements that add poetic space to the nude. They are editorial elements that connect the naked body to movement, sleep, separation, aging, and memories of home. By placing landscapes and flowers with the same force as the body, rather than isolating the body as a special subject, the nude changes from a sexual sign into something that appears and disappears within time.

The Photobook Shapes How Intimacy Is Read

For Nomura, the photobook is both a form for gathering works and a medium for constructing the order in which they are seen. Her official book list includes many photobooks by year, from the early Naked Room to the recent Träumerei^*2. El País reports that Nomura has 34 photobooks, and that her 2025 retrospective in Spain included 142 photographs and 18 photobooks^*13. In an interview with The Kitab, Nomura describes the photobook as a fundamental form and as something that creates a secret relationship with the audience^*17. In the ARTNE interview, she says that by taking apart earlier photobooks, shuffling the photographs, and reconstructing them, she created a feeling of encountering again the works that had existed inside those books^*28. This understanding of the photobook also helps explain why Nomura’s nudes do not move toward explicit sexual expression. Instead of making the body fully forceful in a single image, the turning of pages links naked bodies, flowers, night views, the sea, blank space, and black paper. The reader does not receive information about the subject all at once; the relationship is read through the order of fragments. The official description of Room 416 presents it as a book that combines Polaroids into groups of three, mixing place and time to create brief narratives, and also notes its structure, which allows readers to rearrange triptychs according to their present feelings^*31. L’Oeil de la Photographie also notes that the folded form of Room 416 creates an intimate relationship between the photographer and the reader^*31.

Reading a Black Book with the Body: Another Black Darkness

Nomura’s darkness does not end within the photographic image. In her essay on Another Black Darkness, Briony Anne Carlin reads the book as a bodily experience of reading a photobook, including black paper, black ink, the act of tilting the page, and the way light falls on it^*35In this reading, darkness is not a decorative mood. It becomes a mechanism that makes readers hold the book, search for the image, and alter the speed at which they turn the pages. This also helps explain why Nomura’s male nudes do not move toward explicit sexual expression. The body is not presented as an image that can be possessed at a glance; it gradually appears through the black of the page, reflections, the movement of the hand, and the time of reading.

Distance After Nobuyoshi Araki

The relationship with Nobuyoshi Araki is an important premise for discussing Nomura’s working environment. Her official profile states that she began studying with Araki in 1991, and Fundación MAPFRE explains that she worked as Araki’s assistant for 20 years^*12. Plaster Magazine describes Nomura as Araki’s first and only assistant, while also explaining that she did not simply take over Araki’s direct, explicit, and often described as masculine erotic photographic method^*16. Electra Magazine likewise cautions against reading Nomura’s work as Araki’s simple opposite. It notes that her male nudes carry social and political force, while her own attention moves toward the particular experience that photography makes possible rather than toward a declaration of the “female gaze”^*26. What Nomura appears to have taken from Araki was not the gaze directed at women’s bodies or excessive erotic staging, but an attitude that draws everyday time, bodies, chance, and publications into photographic work. A DigiCame Watch interview shows that her work has been received through male nudes, monochrome, dark images, and a sense of mystery, while also conveying her own account of beginning photography through the accident of choosing a course of study rather than through a dramatic sense of mission^*27. Through the overlap between that contingency and the attitude toward photography she saw near Araki, Nomura’s nudes became photographs that leave behind the fact of a naked person’s presence in black, rooms, and page sequences, instead of images announcing sexual liberation or provocation.

Ango and the Turn Toward Literature and the Book

In Ango, Nomura’s photographs extend into the fields of literature and the book. What matters here is a structure in which text, censorship, postwar memory, and book design act on one another within the same volume, rather than photographs being viewed as standalone images. shashasha introduces Sakiko Nomura: Ango as a book in which Nomura’s photographs meet Sakaguchi Ango’s 1946 short story “Sensō to hitori no onna” (War and One Woman), and it also explains that Ango’s text was censored by the occupation authorities and that an unabridged version was published in 2000^*36. Satoru Machiguchi’s editing and book design place a postwar story cut by censorship in the same page space as Nomura’s dark photographs, which do not clearly explain their figures. In that space, wartime violence, sex, the state, and the distortion of the individual do not remain fixed as a story of the past; they become an experience that contemporary readers reread as they turn the pages. The gallery 176 exhibition page also describes Ango as a project in which Machiguchi brings photographs by Japanese photographers into contact with modern and contemporary Japanese literature within the space of a single book^*38. L’Oeil de la Photographie writes that although Ango is a book by Nomura, who is known for male nudes, no clear male figure appears, and the structure calls into question who the viewing subject is^*37. This work shows how Nomura’s photography extends beyond individual male nudes into a book-based method that uses text, blank space, page order, and the uncertainty of the viewing subject to reread the boundary between intimacy and violence.

Naked Room and Naked Time: Photographing Male Bodies in the Light of the Room

Two representative starting points are Naked Room from 1994 and Naked Time from 1997. AWARE describes Naked Room as Nomura’s first photobook, which established her personal style, and notes that in Naked Time she used only the light available on site, allowing parts of the body to enter darkness and blur^*5. Made in Wonder’s bibliographic information confirms that Naked Time was published by Heibonsha in 1997 as a hardcover photobook with a slipcase^*11. In works from this period, the male body appears as a body moving in a room, as sheets, shadows, and close-range fragments, rather than as a sculptural nude arranged in a bright studio. The nude becomes a medium that preserves the time photographer and subject spent in the same place, more than the perfection of a pose.

Night Flight and Black Darkness: Night, Movement, and Black-Toned Prints

Night Flight and Black Darkness, both from 2008, are important for understanding Nomura’s use of black and night. The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum collection records Night Flight as a 2008 chromogenic print, and 75 as a 2008 gelatin silver print from the Black Darkness series^*6. In Night Flight, movement, sky, and nocturnal light create a tempo distinct from the photographs of bodies; in Black Darkness, figures and places seem to be on the verge of disappearing within black surfaces. The AKIO NAGASAWA exhibition page for Another Black Darkness in 2016 introduces Nomura’s first experiment with solarization and explains that male and female nudes and urban landscapes appear from the black as faint lines^*8. Here, darkness is not simply an atmosphere in the image. It is a method that places bodies, cities, and landscapes within the same black field and asks viewers to search for the image.

About Love, Room 416, and Ango: From Time in a Relationship to the Book

About Love, published in 2017, is a 400-page photobook centered on about 100 men photographed over roughly 20 years. It presents the male nude as a bundle of relationships accumulated over time, rather than as a single subject. shashasha describes the book as a 400-page “declaration of love” made by selecting 100 men, and explains that what appears in the photographs is the distance between Nomura and her subjects^*29. In the more recent Room 416, the structure of Polaroids and triptychs allows nudes, interiors, flowers, and light to be recombined as short narratives. The official website explains that readers can keep the original order or create their own groups of three according to their feelings^*31. In Sakiko Nomura: Ango, also from 2017, Satoru Machiguchi newly edited and designed a book that brings together the unabridged version of Sakaguchi Ango’s “Sensō to hitori no onna” (War and One Woman) and Nomura’s photographs^*36. Tokyo Art Beat introduces A Drop as an exhibition that includes landscapes of Nomura’s hometown of Shimonoseki, the male nudes she has pursued for many years, and early works made when she was 18^*9. Across these works, the shared method lies in keeping the male body unstable within grain, blur, dark areas, page sequence, and its placement beside text before it settles into a complete full-body image.

Nomura’s work has been assessed through photobooks and solo exhibitions in Japan, as well as through recent exhibitions and publications overseas. The AKIO NAGASAWA page for Another Black Darkness notes that her work was received favorably by audiences from around the world at Another Language at the Rencontres d’Arles in 2015^*8. Fundación MAPFRE positions Tender is the Night in 2025 as Nomura’s first large-scale retrospective and explains that her barely illuminated black-and-white male nudes, animals, still lifes, urban landscapes, meteorological phenomena, light, and reflections form a fragmentary, cinematic narrative^*12. El País states that Nomura’s Naked Room was a bold event in Japan that broke stereotypes, and it also reports that the 2025 Madrid exhibition consisted of 142 photographs and 18 photobooks^*13. The Art Newspaper, writing within the recent reassessment of Japanese women photographers, treats Nomura’s Naked Room as a work that shifted the sexual gaze after Araki-style hair-nude imagery^*22. Electra Magazine describes Nomura as an artist who does not define herself primarily through labels such as “woman photographer” or “female gaze,” but directs her attention toward the particular experience that photography can create^*26. The Photographers’ Gallery’s 2026 exhibition Japanese Women Photographers: From 1950s to Now lists Nomura among 27 artists in an exhibition that reconstructs Japanese photographic history through women’s voices and lenses, showing how women artists have challenged convention and redefined photography^*15.

What this international reception reveals about Nomura’s position does not rest only on the rarity of the male nude. Postwar nude photography spoke of freedom, death, and desire through symbolic bodies and explicit eros. Intimate photography in the 1990s turned the camera toward rooms, family, friends, and self-representation. Within these currents, Nomura did not fix the male body as a sexual object, a heroic body, or material for self-confession. Bodies photographed in low light, flowers, night views, the sea, airplanes, and black pages connect to one another inside the photobook, moving the subject from a “body to be shown” toward a “body with whom time was shared.” Fundación MAPFRE’s description of the power and erotic tension in Nomura’s male nudes as wrapped in softness and mystery also supports this position^*12. Nomura’s work can be positioned as a practice that crosses post-Araki eros, 1990s intimate photography, Japanese photobook culture, and the recent reassessment of women photographers, expanding the nude from bodily exposure into a photograph through which relationship, time, and memory can be read.