Kaoru: Bloody Death Idealized

Kaoru is a high fashion photographer who specializes in killing beautiful women. A Japanese Giallo, you ask? More like a buddhist exercise in demystifying and beautifying death. Think Argento without the fear.

Izima Kaoru is an artist who has put together some incredibly strikingly pictures of models and actresses playing dead and loving it or at least finding acceptance. In fact Kaoru enlists the models not merely as fodder for his lens but players in their fictionalized demise. The subjects are often co-conspirators who dream up the most ideal circumstances and clothes (these are glamor shots afterall) in which to die.

I have never understood the appeal of high fashion photography, mostly because it seems too thin and grounded in nothing but making the pretty look prettier...but Kaoru's work has opened my mind a bit to the possibility of using gloss to highlight the beauty in what is usually regarded as horrible. A sort of narrative therapy from a camera.