Nathalie Daoust
Cat, from the series "Tokyo Hotel Story"
2009
Series statement
Nathalie Daoust’s latest project, Tokyo Hotel Story, continues her exploration of female sexuality and 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.