Naked Princess

Beauty and Eros lead toward each other and simultaneously enhance the fairy-like charisma of Murata’s “princesses,” whose exposed vulvas gleam unabashedly.” These licentious reveries will awaken the dormant fairy qualities of the damsels and transform them into nymphomaniac “princesses.”

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.