Japanese Whispers

Zaza Bertrand spent time inside Japan's rabuho, the anonymous "love hotels" where sex and romance are kept deliberately apart, and Japanese Whispers is the document she brought back.

Published by Art Paper Editions in 2016, the 96-page softcover holds seventy color plates printed offset and bound with linen thread, its spine and back cover blind-embossed and its front cover carrying a tip-in image under a printed dustcover. Bertrand photographed the hotels' guests, whom she calls models rather than subjects, in the beds, mirrors, and karaoke rooms built for a few anonymous hours. She could not speak with most of them, and that distance sits inside every picture: a foreign observer granted access but never explanation.

The Belgian photographer built the series over repeated visits, working a subject that Japanese media itself treats with a mix of embarrassment and fascination. Japanese Whispers won the Ibasho Photo Competition and traveled to RIOT in Ghent and Ibasho Gallery in Antwerp, and it established the approach Bertrand later carried into Dreamlands, her series on the gated desert communities of wealthy Egyptians.