Gentlemen’s Club - Foreword Favorites

A lot of photographers have made work around eroticism, sex, and the sex trade, but I’d like to focus on the six that author Lily Burana calls out in the foreword to Gentlemen’s Club. All of these artists have large bodies of photography, this is just a peek at their practice.

Cammie Toloui

Cammie Toloui is a street photographer who has made taken pictures in Portland, Iowa City, London, Moscow, and San Francisco. Her best known series was shot while working at a peep show establishment in San Francisco, called The Lusty Lady. She contextualizes the work in on her website:

I was taking a journalism class. We were learning the art of the photo story, and one of the first assignments was to photographically document our own lives for a week. I wasn't sure how I was going to document my job, but eventually I got up the nerve to bring my camera into the Private Pleasures booth one evening. I was so sure that none of my customers would allow me to photograph them, that I had asked a friend to come in and stand on the other side of the glass so I could take a picture of the booth.

Luckily, he never showed up, because it forced me to take a chance, and the first customer I asked said yes. I couldn't believe it. Even more unbelievable, he came back a few days later and asked me to take his picture again. A few customers later, I was getting the hang of offering a free dildo show in exchange for a picture or two (a ten dollar value!) and to my surprise, people were saying yes!

I continued shooting pictures of consenting customers for a year, and it's really what inspired me to keep working there. I finally quit and ran off to Russia on a new adventure and never worked there again.

Juliana Beasley

Juliana Beasley’s fantastic Lapdancer project grew out of her decade of working as a stripper in New York. She started shooting a club that she danced at, and then branched out from there. [Beasley had previously worked as a photo assistant, including with me on over a dozen sessions in 1991 and 1992.]

Many of the images that are in my book were taken when I had already stopped dancing. And many images were taken in clubs where I had never worked or knew anyone who worked there. But in the beginning, I would bring in a small Contax T2 (later, I would also bring in a larger SLR camera) in order to photograph the dancers and customers during free moments away from the stage or giving private lap dances.

I was surprised at first that so many customers allowed me to photograph them and signed model releases. But after years of dancing for men and listening to them in private conversations, I understood that they often felt overlooked and invisible in their own lives. And so, maybe when I focused the camera on them, for a moment they felt recognized and seen. For a fleeting moment, the voyeur became the object of desire.

David LaChapelle

David LaChapelle was one of the most influential photographers nineties, with his near overnight success starting with Interview Magazine. Surreal scenes with heightened reality, often with nude, or partly undressed idealized figures, all with over-saturated color.

Helmut Newton

Helmut Newton (1920-2004) was a German photographer who was one of the most important figures in the history of the medium. He shot fashion and portraits, but may be best known for his highly-charged black-and-white sexual images.

A choice quote from the master, “I don’t think sex should be fun. Sex is deadly serious. Otherwise it’s not sexy. To me there’s got to be a great element of sin to get people all excited. I don’t see any fun. That’s an American attitude, fun in sex.”

Erika Langley

Erika Langley also made some valuable work at The Lusty Lady in San Francisco. She approached the management about photographing the dancers, but was informed that the only way she would have access to do that was if she danced there herself. She ended up working there for twelve years.

From a 2000 interview for the Seattle Times:

In the dressing room for her audition, Langley found the dancers cracking jokes, teasing each other, "this lively camaraderie." While she was wearing only her new pair of $8 heels, the others had glittery G-strings, glamorous filmy shirts, long gloves and stockings.

"I felt like a complete dork - just pale and goofy and unsexy. I didn't know how to do it," Langley says.

Diane Arbus

Diane Arbus (1923-1971) is an icon of photography. Her work was often outside the bounds of acceptable standards of her time, and remains controversial today. She had a complicated relationship with her subjects, being attracted to them because of their differentness, and then exploiting that difference to make provocative images.

A choice quote: “A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you the less you know.”

Top Image: Cammie Toloui: From the “Gerry” series, 1992.

Second Image: Cammie Toloui: “Lusty Lady Series” 1992. (The majority of this series pictures customers masturbating from behind the glass partition.)

Third Image: Juliana Beasley: Jullian, from “Lapdancer” published 2003.

Fourth Image: David LaChapelle: Travis Scott album cover, 2018.

Fifth Image: Helmut Newton: Two Images for fashion designer Thierry Mugler.

Sixth Image: Erika Langley: Two portraits from "The Lusty Lady” book, published 1997.

Bottom Image: Diane Arbus: “Waitress, Nudist Camp,” 1963.