If Nobuyoshi Araki likes you, he'll take you to the bar he owns in the Kabukicho red-light district of Tokyo. This is the night-time lair of the prolific photographer of the female form, a man dubbed a misogynist, a porn-and-bondage-merchant and a genius. The bar is wallpapered with Polaroid snaps of women: young, older, ripened by years in 'the water trade', some pigeon-toed and shy; others spread-eagled or hogtied. The middle-aged woman Araki employs to serve drinks flits about in a kimono, oblivious. A visitors' board records the celebrities who have come to pay homage. Icelandic singer Bjork, who commissioned Araki to photograph her 1997 Telegram album cover, is there along with Kids director Larry Clark. 'Thank you 4 a lovely day. U R a dirrrty devil,' says one of the more printable comments. Araki himself dominates the room with the jittery, unco-ordinated energy of a teenager, cackling at his own jokes. 'Be careful of walking around and banging into things with that big c*** of yours!' he shouts, as I stumble in the cramped space. Earlier, he tells my bemused female companion some of his photographic techniques. 'I sometimes blow into the breasts of women while I'm photographing them, to make them look bigger,' he says, before exploding in laughter. Araki's work includes thousands of exhibitions and 350 books, an output he adds to at the rate of 10 every year. His photos are always on display somewhere: a new collection runs at the Barbican in London as part of an exhibition called Seduce, which opened on Wednesday. Controversy inevitably follows. Last year, a protester threw Molotov cocktails at an overview of his work in Belgium. Perhaps his greatest work of art is the tuft-haired Araki himself, a man so famous in Tokyo he cannot walk down the street during the day. 'People come up and start snapping away with those damn mobile-phone cameras,' he says. 'They're a nuisance. That's not photography. There is no connection with the subject, no warmth.' Araki hates most modern photography. 'When I look at photos I see no eros or passion. It doesn't matter if it is a picture of a city landscape, or a woman or Mount Fuji. They are all surface, no penetration. The only photos I like to look at are my own, though it's not modest to say so.' Araki can sometimes be spotted at night, walking around Shinjuku and talking to well-wishers. He was born in the downtown Shitamachi district of Tokyo in 1940 and his life mirrors its rise from the smouldering ashes of the second world war. He calls the city his 'womb' and his 'mother' and he seems to both feed off and reflect its vast energy as he pounds the streets armed with an arsenal of cameras. He has photographed other places, and men, but it is Tokyo's women he keeps coming back to, ever since picking up a camera in the 1960s. 'For me, taking photos is essentially an act of love,' he says. 'I know when I look into the viewfinder and can't sense the sexiness that it is going to be a bad photograph. I don't take photographs with my head. I take them with my d***.' He never plans what he will shoot. 'I'm happy in the moment, when I meet someone new and I think we might hit it off. I know nothing about long-term happiness, only what I'm doing right now.' The sexual chemistry of those encounters is what makes a great photo, he says. 'You cannot put into words why you take photos, or what you're doing when you're taking them.' Those libidinous instincts - calling it a philosophy might be pushing it - once made him one of the more shocking and transgressive photographers alive, though the days when a spread-eagled female body could bring the police calling are gone. Many of his photos are scattered around the internet, along with much worse. Araki says he never goes online. 'I don't even have a mobile phone.' His motivation, in any case, has never been to challenge social or cultural rules, he says. 'I have no interest in changing society, though I might have changed two or three women in my time. I guess I'm stingy; I just don't want to waste my time on other people. But if somebody says not to do something, it makes you want to do it all the more, right?' Araki's work, though, still unsettles because of the merciless, cold stare of his lens. Nothing is beyond the viewfinder's unflinching gaze. He photographed his life with wife Yoko, including their honeymoon and lovemaking to her struggle with cancer, and her cremated bones on a steel gurney. The best of his work goes well beyond female objectification and has a pathos that may help it outlive the pornographer tag, such as when Japanese poet Minori Miyata displays the surgery scars from the cancer that will eventually kill her. His latest collection, 6X7 Hangeki, includes its fair share of pliant, demure young things, but many of the older women stare back at the camera with a mixture of defiance, anger, openness, perhaps affection for the cherubic little man at the other end of the lens. 'I'm trying to catch the soul of the person I'm shooting,' he says. 'The soul is everything. That's why all women are beautiful to me, no matter what they look like or how their bodies have aged.' Bjork was one of his most memorable shoots. 'Half virgin, half old bag, like a shaman ... what a face,' he says. For a man whose libido is so bound up with his art, Araki is surprisingly unfazed by the prospect of decrepitude. He has no fear of getting bored of the camera or being unable to work. 'Taking pictures is as natural as eating and then taking a dump for me. It has nothing to do with age. I never think about it, and I'm very diarrhoeic,' he says, cackling, then hits on my female companion. 'Be my wife for a day,' he says. 'Let's ditch this joint.' Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now, Barbican Art Gallery, London. Ends Jan 27, www.barbican.org.uk