The noble Maharaja family and the depths of Indian culture. Gaj Singh II, ruler of Jodhpur in the desert kingdom of Marwar, is called India's last Maharaja. As a young man Kazuyoshi Miyoshi was given special permission to photograph this noble Maharaja's private life; some thirty years later he returned to Jodhpur, was received with trust and invited deeper into the palace, a space filled with the splendour of the pinnacle of Indian culture, where the long history of the Maharajas lives on. Miyoshi, who as a young man won a major Japanese photography prize for his beach photobook Rakuen, made in the Maldives, then travelled the world looking for paradise and reached the world of the Indian maharajas by chance, shooting there more than ten times from the mid-1980s into the 1990s: castles rising from the middle of the desert and marble palaces floating on artificial lakes, beyond the paradise he had imagined. He could photograph the Maharaja himself only by chance, after customs at Delhi airport confiscated his camera and the Maharaja appeared before him in a hotel lobby and allowed him to shoot. Looking back at the thirty-year-old photographs for the book, he realised how much that encounter enriched his career.