Dancing Naked in the Material World

Dancing Naked Why did I decide to do this project? Initially because I was in photo school doing a sequence assignment. I was a bartender (trying to pay for school) and I knew some bartenders who worked nearby at a strip club. I asked if they could help me find a dancer who would allow me to photograph her stripping. At this point, influences from my sociology background kicked in. Why do they do it, how do they do it, what motivated them to do it? The break came when my teacher and mentor, Dennis Darling, asked me to take over a fluff piece for Atlanta Magazine about strip clubs.(lots of them here) The women were not warming up to him, as they all had been approached by too many men asking if they could photograph the women. I was able to approach them as a woman interested in their stories, which I then later recorded through interviews. I worked on this for twelve years on and off and it was near the end of the project when the book deal came through. During that time I worked undercover as a cocktail waitress (a la Gloria Steinem) for a very long month, to experience what it was like inside. My hope was to give the women some human dignity by having an opportunity to express themselves through words and stories. For me, the important nugget of truth was how much we are fundamentally the same.