Izima Kaoru, Death Dressed in Haute Couture

Between fashion, cinema, and visual art, the project undertaken by photographer Izima Kaoru seeks to aestheticise the death of young women. The series Landscapes with a Corpse, published in its entirety in 2008, presents photographs of immaculately-dressed models and actresses appearing in their fantasy death scene.

Born in Kyoto in 1954, the fashion photographer began this series in 1993. He invited his models to choose the designer garments that they would like to be wearing at the moment of their death.

Death, a political subject

The photographs show the subjects in different environments, in the wilderness, lying in water, at an airport terminal, in the snow, in scenes that suggest a natural, gentle death. Other scenes seem less serene and more representative of a murder or a ceremony. The models are always elegant, surrounded by mystery, their bodies fading into the background. Regardless of whether the photographs are close-ups or not, they are never looking at the camera.

Building on the words of Edgar Allan Poe who declared that ‘the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world’, the authors of the text that accompanies the series, Roy Exley, Yuko Hasegawa, and Peter Weiermair, explain that ‘this concept is also deeply rooted in Far Eastern culture: Buddhism even recommends daily meditation on one’s own death.’

The series Landscapes with a Corpse, central to Izima Kaoru’s body of work, saw the artist achieve international fame, but in another of his works, One Sun, he examines a radically different universe. These photographs, taken with a single exposure over the course of a day, trace the trajectory of the sun across the sky, with different points of view according to the place where they were taken, from northern Norway to the Equator. This series can be viewed on the website for the Von Lintel Gallery, who represents the artist.

Landscapes with a Corpse (2008), a photographic series by Izima Kaoru, is published by Hatje Cantz.