In her series, Fairy Tales, Yanagi Miwa reconstructs
scenes from classic and modern fairy tales—Little
Red Riding Hood; Hansel and Gretel;
and Gabriel García Márquez’s Erendira—
in which young girls are confronted by older women. 

In the story of Hansel and Gretel, the siblings
are lost in the woods where they are captured by an old witch who lived in a
gingerbread house. Yanagi stages a dramatic confrontation that contrasts the
young girl’s supple flesh against the witch’s dry, crumpled body. Blurring the
distinction between young and old, Yanagi casts adolescent girls in both roles.
Through special effects makeup and masks, she turns one of the girls into an
old hag. Shot in black-and-white, these photographs are, at times, violent and
disturbing, as in Gretel, which
features a little girl nibbling erotically on the withered claw of a witch who
reaches through the bars of a cage.