In October of last year the uncompromising erotic photographer Nobuyoshi Araki lost the vision in his right eye from a retinal artery obstruction. As a result, the 74-year-old provocateur’s salacious new juxtapositions of naked girls and floral arrangements are half obscured, bringing his personal experience as close to the medium as possible. “I say to myself that I believe I should be able to see things differently,” says the controversial figure of the images curated from his latest show, Love On the Left Eye. The exhibition is the latest example of the man who has tied up Lady Gaga and published over 450 book’s voracious appetite for shooting the female form. “It feels something like looking through their body, as if I can see through women’s skin,” he says of his affinity with his subject. “I can look through her tits and see their back is curved.” For Araki, who documented his honeymoon and the premature death of his wife in his 1991 series, Sentimental Journey/Winter Journey, his diaristic approach to photography is shot through with sex, grief and now, encroaching blindness. “When you lose something, you gain something else,” he says. “Something for the future, maybe.”

Love On The Left Eye runs through June 21 at the Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo.