Erotic Anarchy

A photographic exploration of Tokyo’s sex clubs from the early 1980s by Nobuyoshi Araki.

Tokyo Lucky Hole is a huge volume of photographs documenting the sex clubs of Shinjuku.  The pictures come from a variety of clubs, from the early no-panties coffee houses to specialized perversions such as a club where the patrons lie naked in port-holed coffins and are masturbated by “mourners” sitting atop.

Many of the photographs are taken in and around the public areas of the clubs and document the shows and environment of the clubs, which seem to range from merely titillating or just plain silly to live sex shows where the performers fellate volunteers from the audience on stage or mount them; a bit like a sex-positive circus.

Another common theme is candid snapshots of the performers, most laughing or smiling, all enjoying themselves.  The prologue explains that the sex scene of the early 1980s opened up to amateurs: students and housewives who could make good money in a fairly non-threatening environment of these sometimes very silly venues.  Their good spirit shows through in the pictures.

The most explicit theme is photographs taken in private rooms of patrons and performers engaged in various sex acts: mostly oral or hand jobs, but plenty of plain sex as well.  The images give the sense of being un-staged and candid, and as a result are  amusing and erotic and entirely un-pretentious.  And sometimes very funny, as when a woman’s group scene ends with her peeing at a man shielding himself with an umbrella.

The book is a 700 page, comprehensive documentary of a unique period of sexual history.

If you want beautiful pictures of beautiful women tied up, this is the book for you.  It’s all shibari, all beautifully lit and shot in black and white.  The pictures are all excellent, all perfectly composed.  While the subject is bondage, the subjects appear serene or even laughing; this isn’t a book about rape fantasies, in fact it is hardly a book about sex.

While most shots include bare breasts and erect nipples, and many include genitalia, there is not a single “pink” shot (or whatever the greytone equivalent would be) in the entire book.  There’s one slightly incongruous picture of an MF couple with the man’s hands firmly clasped over the woman’s breasts and dots of what looks like hand lotion on the woman’s abdomen that seems to be intended to signify semen.  Perhaps.

It is a book for beautiful, almost sculptural pictures of women and rope.

Didier Carre’s Stainless Ladies is a nicely produced book of women with transparent dildoes in their vaginas.

There’s more to it than that, of course, but flipping through the images, the prevailing impression is of attractive, muscular women with perfectly shaved pudenda (though not all completely) and clear dildos of various shapes inserted, mostly vaginally, though a few anal insertions are included.

All of the photographs are perfectly lit, carefully composed, artistically posed.  The models are all naked, their only costumes partially inserted.  If their faces are visible, they look directly at the camera.   The pictures are erotic, but in a somewhat clinical way.  The women are gorgeous, but more sculptural than sexual.

Dahamane’s Porn Art 2 is a pictorial essay of Chloe Des Lysses’ willingness to engage in anal sex.  It seems like every other picture is her with someone’s penis in her ass, while she smiles pleasantly at the camera as if posing for a snapshot.

The pictures are sharp and clear and well composed, thematically tied by that pleasant smile.  Almost all are explicit, showing clear penetration, dominated by pictures of anal penetration:

• Anal: 17
• Oral: 8
• Object: 5
• Vaginal: 4
• Cum shot: 3

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Natacha Merritt’s Digital Diaries is a classic work of erotic photography.  It is naive, informal, explicit, and erotic.  The pictures seem un-posed, more snapshots than model shoots.  The subjects are unselfconscious and seem genuinely aroused.  The result is a work of unusual eroticism and immediacy.