It’s a gesture you see in thousands of Japanese photographs, a gesture that’s become banal in nightclubs in Tokyo’s Shinjuku neighbourhood. The stripper walks up to the edge of the stage, her body ferociously protected and contained by her black and strass costume (fishnet stockings, basque, stiletto heels). The clients swarm up to her and, using her long varnished fingernails, she parts the lips of her vagina — Yes, dear children, this is where you come from. As incredible as it may seem, each and every one of you entered the world through here. Araki claims the first thing he did when his mother gave birth to him was to turn around and photograph her cunt. His own beloved wife had no children; she died young of uterine cancer. After her death he began taking pictures of nude women — thousands of them, some prostitutes, others not, but virtually all of them young, with vapid smiles on their faces. Again and again he zoomed in on their cunts. Seen by Araki, flowers, too, become vaginas, their petals labia majora and minora, their pistils clitorises. He captures them in close-up—’because, quite simply,’ he says, ‘I love vaginas. I wish my eyes could travel inside the womb. In spirit I keep getting closer and closer.’ Yes — if men have drawn and filmed and painted and photographed the female body from time immemorial, if they’ve devoted so much time and energy to scrutinising, imagining, projecting, fantasising, veiling, unveiling, hiding, revealing, reworking, decorating and banishing it, it’s because everything revolves around that, the vortex both boys and girls burst out of, the opening that bespeaks…not castration, as Freud stupidly claimed, but rather the void that precedes and follows being.
Precious few women, on the other hand, have painted or photographed male genitals, despite their reputation for being so much more visible! Even I who specialise in the invisible world of heat — night scenes, the hidden face of reality — even I who have always been insatiably curious about the wonders men carry around down there, so different from each other in shape and colour, smell and size — even I, who love to pay the most attentive homage to those wonders with my hands, eyes, lips, and tongue — even I, who relish every micro-stage of undressing a man, figuring out what sort of trousers he’s wearing and how they open, undoing the button or the hook or both, feeling his member’s soft hardness already beginning to swell, trying to guess which direction it’s pointing, undoing the fly and slipping my hand through the opening, still outside of the underpants for the time being, that’s one of my favourite stages — pressing my hand, cheeks, and nose into his crotch, feeling him harden against my face, finally slipping one hand behind the elastic waistband or through the opening of his underpants, sometimes gently removing with my finger or tongue the single pearly drop that oozes from the tip, then circling the stiffened organ itself with my warm and avid hand — even I don’t photograph these things I so adore.
For Fabrice I regret it — I’m sure he would have given his consent. My beloved Haitian husband complied with all my wishes. I was a few weeks shy of nineteen when we married. I’d just arrived in Paris with a scholarship to pursue my studies in photography, and turned my back on the hip neighbourhoods, like Saint-Germain-des-Prés or the Marais, in favour of the city’s northern and eastern edges, where immigrants tend to gravitate because the rents are lower. Fabrice and I were both living in Montreuil when we met at the flea market there. Entranced by the sight of his long fingers on the red Moroccan leather case he’d just purchased for his manuscripts, and with the white pants he was wearing in mid-winter, I entered his bed that same afternoon. He read his poems out loud to me and allowed me to photograph him. That was in December 1978; I became his wife in January; in February we celebrated my naturalisation with a bottle of Asti Spumante; and in April my husband was diagnosed with acute kidney failure. Fabrice and I didn’t have time to disappoint each other.
Oh, the abysmal anguish of that diagnosis. ‘Come off it, doctor. What are you talking about? I’ve just married the most wonderful man in the world and you’re telling me he’s going to die? Come on. You can’t be serious.’ I remember that nephrologist very clearly. His name was Dujardin and he had a salt-and-pepper beard. One day he came in to check the fistula he’d created in Fabrice’s left arm for dialysis. ‘Are you okay?’ he asked the patient. ‘You’re looking a bit pale’—and Fabrice burst out laughing because he was just as black as usual.
Another day, mad with fear, I got down on my knees in Dr Dujar-din’s office, feverishly begging him to allow me to give Fabrice one of my kidneys (we had the same blood type, a rare one) — but the answer was no. The law stipulated that donors had to be either newly dead, the patient’s blood relatives, or both. ‘Besides,’ Dr Dujardin said, walking me to the door of his office with an arm nonchalantly thrown around my shoulders, ‘there’s no way I’m going to carve up such a lovely body. Out of the question.’
I managed to smile back at him, but not too much, just enough so that he’d allow me to take photos of Fabrice anywhere in the hospital including the dialysis centre, and to declare his room off-limits to the nurses during my visits. The imminence of death seemed to make Fabrice’s whole body as swollen and hypersensitive as his sex. I came to see him every day but only dared slip into bed with him on the days midway between his sessions with ‘The Machine’. Then, no longer exhausted by the previous session and not yet exhausted by the impurities accumulated in his blood, he had energy and could stay inside me for hours on end, hard and happy. We’d fuck calmly, casually, talking and teasing each other even as we fucked; now and then our passion would suddenly burst into flames, and when that happened he’d give himself up to me, tossing his head back and saying, ‘Yes, yes, fuck me, my love, fuck me, baby’ the way a woman might say to a man—‘Yes my love, take me, take me’—and, acutely aware that the illness was destroying his beauty (his hair was greying by the day and he was putting on weight), I photographed him a few times like that — naked and totally abandoned beneath me, yes, while he was still inside of me and I was fucking him so to speak with his own cock, I’d get him in the viewfinder and press the shutter again and again, moved to tears by Fabrice’s wild beauty when he came. ‘More, my love,’ he’d say, ‘more, more, take me, yes, fuck me, give me your syrup…’ Looking at him through the viewfinder I’d see him as a child, an adolescent, a youth, an old man, I was insanely in love with this poet and I was about to lose him, and so, even as I fucked him, I took pictures of him in that position of utter abandonment, his head tossed back, his neck offered up to me and his lips moving, murmuring — until the explosion of light made me release the camera, arch up, then collapse, laughing and weeping myself to sleep upon his chest.
My, my, says Subra. Are you sure all that happened in the hospital?
Well, it might have been at our place, between hospitalisations. But what I wanted to say was, why would I have taken photos of his cock? The upright peckers immortalised with maniacal symmetry by Mapplethorpe leave me cold. Body parts in general bore me, and the only time I ever made pornographic photos, with Yasu my Japanese ‘twin’ (polaroids of our organs in close-up, intensely involved in this or that), I threw them out afterwards because they’d lost their meaning. What I care about are stories. Faces always tell stories, bodies sometimes do, body parts, rarely. Flashing — an exhibitionist who gets off on the shock in a girl’s eyes when he suddenly, unexpectedly shows her his penis — is the exact equivalent of peep-shows, where men pay to spend a few seconds watching flesh in movement…Furtive, transgressive, breathtaking bits of image, fragmentary as hallucinations — infra-meaning, infra-syntax, flash, flash, flash! Nothing could be more at odds with my own æsthetics. My gaze insists on moving slowly and deeply, so I never use flash. I put a filter over my light source so it won’t dazzle or surprise my subject. I try to make the moment vibrate to suggest duration.