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.'
