The world of the strip club is one of closed doors and private booths. The dancers, the girl’s who work there do so out of choice but there appears to be no obvious winner in this situation; the men pay for a bit of acting and an anticlimactic dance, the girls get money for playing a part with men they might and do often despise. the limitations of the fantasy the girls provide are obvious and this is the focus of the project. Instead of photographing the glamourous dresses or the flirtatious looks they give the customers; the images show the girls getting ready, highlighting just how different their real lives are and details around the club show the business nature and cold realities of the environment. The girls are kept anonymous as this is a huge part of the fantasy world and this anonymity creates a contrast between the desired world and the actuality of it.
Accepting the ambiguous nature of photography and the personal influence the practitioner has on their own images; i have made this project aware of the limitations of the document. Instead of being a purely factual description of the club and the people that work there, it is a personal interpretation of the situation. The photographs describe how i felt at the time of taking them. As Susan Lipper wrote in her introduction to ‘Grapevine’: “These pictures are not an effort to document in any real sense… but (are) rather the collision of my experiences, the tangible world and the nature of photography. “
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