Pretend Geisha – One Shot Story

This was in 2015, the same year I began the project Nansensu. A local TV celebrity came across my early work. She asked me to make something ‘darker than boudoir’, something private to hold as a memory of her youth.

Later I realized that was merely an excuse.

She stepped into a pre-booked Japanese washitsu with her Chanel perfume lingering in the air. In one fluid sequence she turned her back to me, kicked off her Valentino heels, let her Burberry trench coat and pantyhose slide from her body, stripped away every piece of jewelry but a single ring on her index finger, then slipped into a yukata, tightened the obi, and knelt before me. All in minutes, her warmth seeped into the unheated room. All so smooth, as if she had done this a thousand times before.

That’s her, a self she could not show in public. And that was what she wanted my photos to preserve for herself.

In front of her audience, she was polished and marketable. She lived on money, fame, and recognition from friends and colleagues, from sponsors and fans, from rivals, from young men who worshiped her and from young women who envied her.

But here, she dressed as a pretend geisha. Tattoos revealed themselves across her back. Lovely toes folded under her, as if offering submission, while her expression held a distance that kept me outside. I saw an elegant body inviting and resisting at the same time.

She wasn’t a geisha, of course. But in the act of pretending she revealed another side of herself, a side hidden behind masks of performance and expectation. That, to me, is where photography stopped being documentation. It became a mirror. A mirror for a hidden self, the one that slips between who we are and who we appear to be in others’ eyes.

P.S. At the time she agreed this image could be shown without her name, since her identify isn’t recognizable in the frame.

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