The Banquet by Nobuyoshi Araki is documenting the meals shared with his late wife, Yoko, during her final days. Published in 1993 in Japan, this project is regarded as one of Araki’s most personal works, contrasting sharply with his earlier explorations of eroticism and street life in Tokyo. Here, Araki embraces a quiet, deeply personal narrative that renders everyday moments into meditations on mortality, memory, and the fragile beauty of life. Through each photograph, he documents not just food, but the quiet, emotionally laden ritual of dining together—capturing a blend of sorrow, tenderness, and reverence.
The project is divided into three distinct sections that narrate the trajectory of Yoko’s illness and their shared resilience. The first section consists of vibrant color photographs of food captured with a macro lens and ring flash, giving each dish a vivid and detailed appearance. These intense close-ups blur the line between food and flesh, evoking the visceral nature of the human body and underscoring a corporeal connection between life and nourishment. Araki's choice of ring flash lighting creates stark, almost clinical highlights, casting shadows that accentuate textures and contours. The food, while initially appetizing, gradually evokes themes of decay and impermanence that shadows even the most everyday rituals.
As the series progresses, Araki transitions to black-and-white images that portray a subdued, haunting atmosphere, marking a dramatic shift as Yoko’s condition worsened. Shot with available light and a steady, long-exposure technique, these images lack the vibrancy of the earlier section, reflecting the fading color in Araki’s life. Here, each meal becomes an act of preservation, a final celebration of their time together, captured in somber monochrome as though memorializing their shared time. His minimalist setup—a single table lamp, tripod, and a single-second shutter exposure—heightens the sense of finality in each frame, transforming the dining table into a stage for both quiet resilience and inevitable loss.
In The Banquet, food becomes a symbol of complex emotional weight, binding sustenance to the passage of life. Against this backdrop, critics have re-evaluated Araki’s practice for its shift toward vulnerability and emotional depth, distinct from his earlier provocations. Building on that reception, the 2012 Errata Editions reprint broadened access for international readers, while key presentations—such as Feast for the Eyes: The Story of Food in Photography (C/O Berlin, 2019; The Photographers’ Gallery, London, 2020)—situated the series within debates on appetite, the body, and grief.
