THE MEN IN THESE PHOTOS ARE NOT MODELS.  THEY ARE CUSTOMERS THAT FREQUENTED THE STRIP CLUB I WORKED AT.  (PROJECT DETAILS BELOW)

SHUT UP AND KEEP DANCING

My experiments have always been a way for me to understand differently.  I got a job as a dancer in a strip club and I brought my camera with me everyday.   For a long time, in the beginning, I felt like a photo journalist lurking around a strip club.  I wore an inappropriate Fifi Chachnil lace night gown with a lot of sparkly jewelry and got my hair done in a bouffant before each shift.  I looked retarded.  It was  a brothel, not Valentine’s Day with my boyfriend.  I wouldn’t speak to any men that came in, but rather I would ask the girls all my weird loaded questions and take lots of photographs.  I think the girls felt very little for me.  I was not a part of their circle at all.  There were some rumors of why I was there.  ”She’s secretly very wealthy but has a hidden, dirty obsession for taking her clothes off in front of strange men.” HA! Doesn’t everyone?

Months went by and my thinking had not evolved very much.  I was roughly the same girl with tons of flat photographs and opinions of the girls I was working with.  I knew something had to break, and it came in the form of a robbery.  My apartment was completely robbed of everything.  Suddenly I lost some of my security and I lost some of my ego.  Life quickly became not as thoughtful; it was survival.  Until now I’ve had everything I needed.  But what if I didn’t?  The feeling of being robbed of everything, living in dirty hotel rooms, cold cities, no friends, no home.  When I couldn’t afford a hotel for the night, I would sneak onto an overnight bus to another city and work there for the day and then catch the bus back in order to save money on a place to sleep.  This empty scary feeling that breeds ’unthoughtfulness.’  It changed the way I went to work after that. I didn’t feel like I was on the outside, I felt like part of the team.  We were a gang of resilient young women doing our best with whatever our situation in life was.  I saw how that feeling of “desperate” pushes people beyond their moral limits.  I saw how easy it was to get lost or put yourself in a vulnerable and dangerous situation.  I also saw how good it felt to be independent.

Dancing is a bit of a drug addiction.  Independence, attention, money- it’s fuel for women to fly very high.  Then there are the low-lows.  When a person in the club disrespects you.  When you’re valued as an object and your feminine soul is worthless.  Feeling worthless is excruciating.  I think women generally want the same things- Love, Family, and Security.  We’re all handed different cards in life and doing the best we can?

Next, although it was a bit unethical, I started to bring a small voice recorded to the club.  I hid it in my bra and recorded the men talking to me during our “private” shows. I found it extremely interesting to hear what these men had to say to me, a young girl.  Men in strip clubs are always trying to get the girls to go out with them on a date, so I’d say, “OK.”  I would have dates with them and record them there also.  Originally, I had wanted to photograph women in these clubs, but as time went by, it was the men that were obsessed with the women that became so intriguing.  What was more weird, that a woman would sell her panties to a man in the club, or that a man would beg to buy them?  According to Psychologist C.G. Jung, a female component exists in every man’s psych and vice versa.  It is called the male anima.  It manifests itself by appearing in dreams as well as by influencing a man’s interaction with women and his attitude towards them.

In my opinion, femininity does not exist in a strip club.  This environment has everything to do with the male ethos.  The girls abandon their inner female soul and instead can be made up with self tanners, make up, fake eyelashes and hair, ect. and walk around like dolls that mirror the male fantasy.  The first thing we were told at work was to shut off whatever was going on with ourselves outside the club.  The way we looked was a vision created by the men in the club. The way we looked was narrated by the male anima.

My project changed direction many times.  Eventually, as my thinking evolved, I put an experiment together.  I pranced around a strip club night after night, finding different men that wanted to spend the whole night in a private show with me .   Some of these men came back night after night, week after week and I developed an intimate relationship with them.  Slowly revealing to me the unconscious idea of the feminine in his mind, painting me a vivid picture of their anima and then eventually coming with me to my studio and photographing it.  For such a delicate, almost deviant issue, it was difficult to gain their trust into exposing so much of themselves to me.

Here is what helped: People are very open when they’re completely intoxicated very late at night and in a dark room with a stripper.  I’m talking 4, 5, 6 in the morning, a gram of coke, twenty drinks, etc. Unconsciously, men exposed so much of themselves to me.  Because of the booze?  Because it’s just that kind of place where people leave their inhibitions at the door?   Most likely they figured I was drunk too and at the same party.  But I wasn’t.  I wanted to eventually take their photo. A photo of the woman that lives inside them.