Sexual fantasies the theme of photographer's dream project

Nathalie Daoust has spent much of her professional life photographing prostitutes and sadomasochists. Her latest project involves shooting in hotel rooms with dominatrix who torture screaming, drooling men. The Canadian says she is drawn to the dark, inaccessible worlds of sexual desire and taboo. So I wonder what to expect - a tattooed, leather-clad vixen, perhaps?

Not a bit of it. The woman who greets me in the lobby of a Tokyo hotel is clean-cut, with the cerebral air of an art student. There is not even a nose-ring in sight. In conversation the 36-year-old is thoughtful and reflective about her work, much of which involves explorations of female sexuality. "I want to uncover the universal human desire to escape reality," she says. "I am interested in the extremes people go to escape, and who they pay for it."

That artistic drive has sent her to some unusual, even dangerous places. In Rio de Janeiro, Daoust based one three-month conceptual project around prostitutes working in a dilapidated brothel. She was fascinated by the women's fight for dignity in their grimy environment. "The taxi drivers did not even want to drop me off in the area," she recalls, smiling. "But I have never got into a situation I couldn't control."

Daoust is in Tokyo to direct a movie about the denizens of a notorious love hotel, the Alpha-In. A venue for hardcore fetishists, every room is kitted out with the specialist tools of the bondage trade: chains, whips; pulleys in the ceilings; the priciest room has a steel cage and an open toilet - you get the idea. But Daoust insists she is more interested in the clients who use the hotel than the eye-popping hardware. "The people I met were fantastic."

The women work for a call-out agency specialising in S&M and are paid about US$300 a session with their male clients, she says. Some are hired for their, um, unique skills, such as spitting or purging. "When I started photographing this world, I didn't understand it at all," she says. "I had preconceived notions about it - the sort of things my mother used to say: 'These people must be deranged', and so on. Why would people want to hurt each other? I wanted to know why they do it and respect their choices."

Some of the women have surprising motives, she discovers. "I know one who is a dentist and does it partly for pleasure." Some do it for money. Even the men, she says, are "super sweet", mostly submissive types. "They only want to please. Though they're probably different to dominant types."

The product of that empathy with her subjects is a stunning, surreal series of portraits, titled "Tokyo Hotel Story", in which 39 women are photographed surrounded by the paraphernalia of their trade. In leather and high heels, or thrust up for work, many of the women look defiant and powerful, some distance from the Japanese cliché of passive femininity.