sakamoto 
A camera’s harsh flash reveals a seated, semi-naked woman in a dark forest, posing provocatively in something like black PVC. Discarded condoms litter the ground like plastic flowers. This is the ecology of sex in the Bois de Boulogne, west of Paris. The vast woods, which encircle the Longchamp racecourse and the Roland Garros tennis venue, are a haven for prostitutes of all kinds.
I first encountered the photographer Nakata Masashi through his series about the Bois de Boulogne, shot between 2005 and 2009. Nakata was born in 1969 in Hirosaki, Aomori prefecture. As a youth, he was a hardcore track and field athlete and a boxer. He also liked to draw, and after high school, enrolled through a newspaper scholarship at a Tokyo photography college. Until graduating, he worked for two years at a newsagent’s in Tsukishima, then for another year at a neighbourhood photo lab. He then wandered India and Nepal. On his return to Japan, he continued making his own photographs while working part-time jobs.
His life until then had centred for more than 20 years around a 20,000-yen-per-month flat with no bath in Kawaguchi, Saitama prefecture. He worked as a window cleaner. The job allowed long holidays, and he would head off on photography expeditions when he had saved enough money.
His growth as a photographer began with environmental and social documentary, but he says he grew tired of this. He began re-thinking what truly interested him…something he would never get bored of. He embarked on his new tack by shooting at the Eros Centre in Berlin in 2005, then photographing amateur models on their request for his I Model series. He also photographed female university students in Thailand and other subjects, including the Boulogne woods. He says he sought projects that ‘never cease to stimulate my dirty mind,’ that he submits his pictures to contests, and they are sometimes selected.
When I wrote about Nakata in 2013, he gave this description of his Paris project:
You see ‘street whores’ all over the world, but perhaps only in the Bois de Boulogne will you encounter ‘forest whores.’ It is a meeting of two extremes: pure, sacred nature, and base, human lust. When I first visited the woods looking for my subjects, I had no idea where they might appear. My first encounter was a surreal clash with a woman’s bare flesh dressed in vinyl against the dark chlorophyll of the forest. One of the sex workers warned me against walking too far into the forest, but my lust got the better of me and I went deeper on my adrenaline.
The prostitutes were friendly and cheerful. I did not feel they were destitute. I photographed more than a dozen in three days. Most were willing to strike a pose, and they made the project fun. I went back for a more serious shoot four years later, in May 2009. This time, I knew where my subjects would be waiting. I also dared take some peeping shots. I was more wary of the johns than the prostitutes, as some of them can be dangerous. My camera was a Hasselblad with a standard lens, so the people came out small. But I think the dark green forest made a nice contrast with the humans.
In the end, I photographed over three dozen subjects, paying them each around 20 to 40 euros.
One sight particularly shocked me. In a large planter box away from the main road, about six tatami mats (nine square metres) in size, I came across a carpet of used condoms. The earth was covered with them. This sexual debris was sickening and awe-inspiring. Is there anywhere else you would see such a thing?
Governments around the world have been clamping down on prostitution. France’s ban on soliciting from 2003 appears to have pushed more and more sex workers off the streets and into the woods. I wonder if the Paris fringe will give us more Ladies of the Boulogne Forest, in the manner of the historic film by Robert Bresson.