Akiho, 2009

Nathalie Daoust  

The canadian artist Nathalie Daoust latest project "Tokyo Hotel Story" continues her exploration of female sexuality and subversion of gender stereotypes. Spending several months in the Alpha In, one of the biggest S&M “love hotels” in Japan. Daoust photographed women in their private rooms, surrounded by the specialist equipment and dressed in the regalia that define their trade. Her work takes the viewer beyond taboos while showing the universal human desire to escape reality and create fantasy worlds that often oscillate between dream, reality and fiction.

Nathalie Daoust is interested in the women who work at the “Alpha In”. A portrait was created showing 39 women. One enters a very different world that doesn’t just offer men the possibility to escape reality by assuming different roles and reinventing themselves. Nathalie Daoust spent several months at this well-known nightclub in order to carefully approach this subject. Besides one-in-one interviews and the experiences on-site, her work in the darkroom is considered to be the most important process, in which she developed the pictures dependent on her currently felt emotions.