Nathalie Daoust’s 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 39 women in their private rooms, surrounded by the specialist equipment and dressed in the regalia that define their trade. Her work takes the view 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 ina darkroom. This allows Daoust to manipulate the negatives more faithfully to the images she felt and saw in her mind’s eye at the time of shooting.