Born in 1967, Kyoto-based photographer Miwa Yanagi burst onto the Japanese art scene in 1994 with "Elevator Girl" (1994-98), her photo series depicting groups of uniformed women languidly posing in empty shopping arcades. Since then, much of her work has reflected a theatrical aesthetic. For "My Grandmothers" (2000-09), Yanagi asked young women to imagine their lives 50 years in the future and then used elaborate sets and makeup to realize those visions. The black-and-white series "Fairy Tale" (2004-06) restaged scenes from folk stories such as Cinderella and Snow White with a macabre twist, highlighting the cannibalistic tension between the old witch and budding beauty archetypes that recur in such narratives.
