“Amazing things are always around us, whether they are real or not. I always photograph ordinary things, because photographs are the record of living things.” Araki, a key iconoclast of great talent, is one of the most prolific photographers of his time. Having already published several hundreds of books and thousands of pictures, Araki has indeed for over fifty years revolutionized the world of photography. His outlook is both sentimental and filled with energy, whereby the Erotos (a combination of Eros and Thanatos) appears in every image. Araki is photography. His practice lies at the heart of his existence, the camera being an extension of his own self. Araki offers us a peculiarly dark body of work. The photographs in Crazy Old Man A follow a dynamic in which the inanimate becomes alive and the living appears dead. Instant films, framed in black and white, alternate here. These appeal to Araki in the way they spark memories of ancestors’ portraits. One may recognize in them the artists’ visual vocabulary -naked women, bondage, suggestive flowers, various toys as well as abstract compositions he had painted.