In 1992, two years after graduating from NYU's photography program, Juliana Beasley, now 35, determined to supplement her meager income as a novice photographer in a competitive market and inspired by the thought of good money at flexible hours, embarked on an eight-year odyssey as a professional nude dancer. Specializing in "lapdances" -- in which a woman dances above a seated customer, erotically brushing against his body -- she worked in over two dozen strip clubs in the United States, from New York to Reno, dancing for twenty dollars a head, and sharing the rewards and pitfalls of the profession: good earnings, poor earnings, emotional and physical exhaustion, and an arrest for prostitution.

But Beasley, though in every sense the professional lapdancer she had in effect become, never forgot the purpose of her studies in documentary work. Accordingly, along with her transparent negligees and stiletto heels, she also regularly brought to the clubs her camera. In time, she also began recording testimonies of the milieu, from managers, dancers, and club patrons, and to put to paper a record of her own hard-earned experience.

The result Lapdancer, is her insider-view of the world of professional nude dancers. Culled from her thousands of photographs and dozens of hours of interviews, Beasley provides an unsentimental, unblinking look inside an often caricatured (e.g., Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls), but seldom understood universe, a closed and controlled world of rules and rituals, hermetically-sealed from society by an army of bouncers and surveillance cameras.

Beasley's ultra-vivid color images, shot with Contax cameras on open flash, shine a light on the typically low-light environment. Utilizing specially processed 35mm movie film, the resulting images, neither glamorous nor "gritty," often resemble traditional American bachelor-party snapshots. Among the pasted-on smiles, among leering or self-conscious faces, one slowly comes to understand that her subject is Men as much as it is Women.

Through text and images Beasley, like Dante's Virgil, guides us through this monde clos, detailing its ruthlessly economic underpinnings, as well as the intimate/anonymous currency between dancer and customer. Her observations, never sensationalistic, are rather a fit companion to the cultural theories of Marx or Freud. Here, at society's very edge, she uncovers a treasure-trove of fin-de-siecle metaphor for sexuality, gender politics, capitalism, therapy and even love.

 

Text © Jacques Menasche