Nathalie Daoust: Tokyo Hotel Story

Nathalie Daoust: Tokyo Hotel Story

Nathalie Daoust’s latest project, Tokyo Hotel Story, continues her exploration of female sexuality and subversion of gender stereotypes. Spending several months living in Alpha In, one of the biggest “love hotels” in Japan. Daoust made intimate portraits of 39 women in hotel rooms, surrounded by the specialist equipment and dressed in the regalia that define their trade. Daoust believes numerous challenges still exist in terms of confronting deep-rooted stereotypes of gender-roles. Her work helps her to delve beyond taboos while showing the universal human desire to escape reality and create fantasy worlds that often oscillate between dream, reality and perversion.
All images are photographed on analogue film and hand printed in a darkroom. This allows Nathalie to manipulate the negatives more faithfully to the images she felt and saw in her mind’s eye at the time of shooting.
There are also images of the 26 different rooms of the S&M Love Hotel. By photographing each space empty -  without the girls – Daoust allows the viewer  an intimate, even voyeuristic glimpse into these bare rooms.

Opening: 27 September 2012, 7 p.m.

On view: 28 September – 26 October 2012.