Nathalie Daoust

Nathalie Daoust (born March 31, 1977) is a Canadian photographer and contemporary artist.

Daoust studied photography at the Cégep du Vieux Montreal (1994–1997).

Upon graduating, she moved to New York City, where she spent two years inhabiting and photographing the uniquely themed rooms of the Carlton Arms Hotel.

In 1997 Daoust was invited to decorate a room in the Carlton Arms Hotel in New York City – a hotel that, for the past 40 years, has invited artists such as Banksy, Andre Charles and Paco Simone to transform its rooms and walls.

Daoust created a ‘childhood dreamland’ crowded with games and plush animals and fully painted in Crayola-bright colours.

After completing her room, Daoust was inspired to live in the Carlton Arms Hotel, intending to explore it photographically.

For the following two years, she stayed alternately in every room to absorb each artist’s singular universe.

The resultant images explore the interaction between subject and closed environment, engaging with the uncertainty of self as each room becomes a microcosmic world.

These images comprise her first book, New York Hotel Story, published in 2002.

New York Hotel Story introduces many of the themes she grapples with in subsequent works, including identity, gender, sexuality, time and memory, and escapism.

Her photographs focus on exposing hidden desires and dreams, frequently manifested in the margins of society.

Too often this margin is inhabited by women, as many of her projects attest.

From portraits of female sex workers in Brazil and Japan, to the role of women in contemporary Chinese society, Daoust explores the darker side of the construction of female identity.

Daoust is led by her desire to understand the human impulse to construct experiences that allow us to live, for at least a moment, in a fictive world.

From female dominatrices at a Japanese S&M hotel in Tokyo Hotel Story, to one man’s decision to discard his own identity in favour of another's in Impersonating Mao, her work inhabits the liminal space between fiction and truth.

Her most conceptually complex project to date, Korean Dreams, explores the ideological manifestation of a fantasy.

While traveling through North Korea she observed the manipulation of reality on a national scale, capturing the layers of forced illusion perpetuated by the North Korean government.

Employing a variety of means to address her subjects, Daoust's technique plays a crucial role in communicating content.

She employs non-digital techniques so that the process of creating the image itself contributes to her conceptual explorations.

These photos were published in a book of the same name in 2002.

Tokyo Girls

Tokyo Girls is an animation-like picture series capturing 30 women from around the world, united in Japan to perform striptease.

Photographed using lenticular technology – a technique that imparts the illusion of movement – the women seem to dance, vamp and primp in front of our eyes, caught in a perpetual loop of seduction and solicitation.

While their fate could seem melancholy, the dancers have a certain light-hearted frivolity, epitomized by the woman who winks coyly at us while performing her dance.

Despite sharing the same occupation, each portrait represents a unique individual.

Photographed against a white backdrop, the women are able to tell their own stories by communicating via movement and expression.

Daoust does not allow them to become stereotypes, but lets them reveal the conscious artifice of their trade.

Entre Quatre Murs, Berlin

Focusing on the construction of female identity, Entre Quatre Murs, Berlin, is a series of compositions involving women and space.

Each image is a composite of elements, separated from the original photograph and printed on layers of transparent orthochromatic film.

By superimposing these layers, the image is reconstituted three-dimensionally.

This sequence of three-dimensional portraits transparentizes the female body, as Daoust interweaves her subjects with their surroundings until the distinction between self and environment almost disappears.

By dissolving these confines dividing external and interior, the scenes reflect and suggest a microcosmic snapshot of the mind.

Street Kiss, Brazil

On 4 October 2014, Daoust married Jonathan Douglas-Scott-Montagu, a biochemist who is the younger half-brother of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu.

Nathalie Daoust is currently working on her new project about Mongolia.

She aims to portrait the Mongolian nomadic families who are forced to abandon completely their way of life and move to the capital due to the effects of global warming and modernisation.

These local tribes from the steppe have wiped out their livestock in the last increasingly severe winters, and are now settling into the Ger district, a "tent city" made of Yurts in Ulaanbaatar.

These vast neighbours nowadays represent 62% of the population of the capital.

New York Hotel Story