Princess of Desire
Year: 2007 Ken-ichi Murata
“Inspired by fairytales , classic literature and his fear of death Ken-ichi Murata has make his own fairytale “Princess of desire”. In “Princess of desire” you can find fragments of this fairytale with beautiful nude japanese models in bizarre sceneries with a lot of symbolic in it . These unique photos show that Murata is a great artist.”
“The black-and-white photographs are hand colored by Yumiko Yamasaki, which gives a very dreamy atmosphere that fits perfectly with the imagery.”
Description
Japanese photographer and visual artist Murata creates highly detailed photographic stagings which evocatively depict nude models as though they were characters in an erotic fairytale. His enchanting models blithely shed their clothing and reveal their gorgeous nude bodies. What Murata strives to illustrate with these young girls is the image of the hime: an ancient Japanese word which can denote both a feeling of awe and a yearning for women. The conventional meaning of the word “hime” is noble princess. His second photobook too is a virtuosic and fantastic journey into erotic dream worlds.
The photographer Ken-ichi Murata was born in 1957 in the metropolis of Osaka, Japan, where he still lives and works today. The black-and-white prints in this book have been masterfully hand colored by the photographer’s muse Yumiko Yamasaki, who was born in Osaka, 1975. After a lengthy phase of searching for his artistic self, Murata took a daring step in 1996: he displayed his fairytale, erotic, fantasy worlds at his first successful public exhibition in Tokyo. Other exhibitions, book publications and magazine articles followed, but all of these events were restricted solely to Japan. Now his obsessive photographs are an exciting new discovery for Europe and the rest of the world.