Love & Lust/The 80's

Searching the fringes of culture with a camera as a ticket into drag show dressing rooms, strip clubs, tattoo parlors (before they were cool) and an introduction to anyone I thought might be interesting, led me on a journey through some of the taboo haunts of the south. The people I met there helped form a more empathetic view of those who were left on the outside of mainstream society. Those people your mother warned you about turned out to be kind and generous, their lifestyles belied by friendships and needs, the same as all of us. A common denominator is love and lust and in these portraits, the inhibitions placed on us by social constraints are unabashedly disavowed by those who, not allowed into “polite” society, chose to explore those aspects of humanity with, perhaps, a little more honesty. Curiosity is a powerful motivator for documentary photography and my own was at its zenith in the 1980’s where youth and exuberance trumped caution and the camera became an excuse without which I would have seemed just another voyeur. But then, what’s wrong with that?