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Flexible hours:
In 1992, two years after graduating from NYU's photography program, Juliana Beasley, then 25, desperate 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. Photo © Juliana Beasley.
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Lap dance:
Specializing in “lap dances” – in which a woman dances above a seated customer, erotically brushing against his body – Beasley worked in over two dozen strip clubs in the United States, from New York to Reno, dancing for twenty dollars a head, and sharing rewards and pitfalls of the profession: good earnings, poor earnings, emotional and physical exhaustion. Photo © Juliana Beasley.
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Negligees and camera:
But Beasley, though in every sense the professional “dancer” she had in effect become, never forgot the purpose of her interest and studies in documentary work. Accordingly, along with the 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. Photo © Juliana Beasley.
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A foul curse:
“Some nights, there seems to be a foul curse upon me and however coy and charming I might be, I can't convince a customer to ‘dance’ with me. The more customers wave me away…the more self-conscious I become.” Photo © Juliana Beasley.
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The magical glow:
“Customers can smell desperation, just like they can sense the magical glow enveloping the most popular dancer in the club. She's the one whose customers line up outside the private dance area waiting for her to finish with another customer. She's the one who runs later to the stage when the DJ calls her name. Her hair is disheveled and makeup is running off her face. She's been marked by every man in the pack who wants a piece of the action. Sometimes I am that girl.” Photo © Juliana Beasley.
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Not Showgirls:
Lapdancer, is Juliana Beasley’s insider-view of the world of professional nude dancers. Culled from her thousands of photographs and dozens of hours of interviews, she 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. Photo © Juliana Beasley.
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Men and Women:
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 and self-conscious faces, one slowly comes to understand that her subject is Men as much as it is Women. Photo © Juliana Beasley.
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Desire and fear:
“It is the anonymous nature of the lapdance that allows for such closeness between strangers. The lapdance becomes a metaphor for this human contradiction: the deep desire for intimacy, yet the simultaneous fear of it.” Photo © Juliana Beasley.
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Never sensationalistic:
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 theoretics 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, theraphy – even love. Photo © Juliana Beasley.
Lapdancer
These photos are from Lapdancer published by powerHouse Books. Photos © 2003 Juliana Beasley.
You’ll find the book online at amazon.com or powells.com or at your local quality bookstore.
- American Ethnography Quasimonthly is published by the Intercontinental Institute for Awesome Anthropology and Ethnographic Excellence
- © 2010, 2011, 2012