Making Photos of Sex Workers
Thoughts on past photography series about sex work. Suggestions for practices in the future.
I have thought a lot about Peter Schafer’s Diary of a Sex Tourist since it was published. It has taken me a while to formulate this response because the issues it raises are complex. Schafer’s article is about two very different things: visual storytelling and sex work/ers. It feels important to separate these two things and talk about each so as to give the fairest response to Schafer’s work, to the motivations he gives for making it, and to his use of his images to advocate for the decriminalisation of sex work.
I’d like to acknowledge what makes Schafer’s work interesting, but I mostly I want to point out where I think Schafer has veered into the contradictory and problematic. I’ll do this by looking at some other photography projects, and drawing on my research expertise in collaborative photographic projects. Hopefully I’ll lay out some ideas that might result in better practices in the future for photographers wanting to cover sex work/ers.
Fair background, my story first
I began my career in photojournalism and documentary photography, but I have spent the last six years feeling increasingly uncomfortable with, and moving away from, being the arbitrator of stories. I am particularly ill-at-ease with telling the stories of those whom photojournalists and documentary photographers so frequently focus their lenses on; like the sex workers Schafer has photographed.
This isn’t because I think stories about sex workers should not be told. It isn’t because I have lost faith in the ability of images to draw attention to social injustice, to advocate for change, or to challenge stereotypes. It’s because I think that where possible and appropriate the people who the feature in the stories photographers tell should be involved in telling them, through each stage of the process, from conception to exhibition.
What this focus on the social and relational aspects of picture making has ultimately meant is that I have moved from being a photographer to a photo-based collaborator. This expanded way of working, which primarily grows from a desire to make photographic stories with and for people, rather than of people, includes the introduction of a range of collaborative and participatory methodologies that facilitate co-authorship with the same people who may traditionally have been the ‘subjects’ of this kind of image making and sharing.
Why me?
Schafer’s piece was published on Medium. Pete Brook, editor of Vantage, saw it and offered to copy-edit it and push it out under the Vantage banner. Schafer accepted. A day later Pete Brook wrote and editor’s opinion piece Why I Included “Diary of a Sex Tourist” in the Medium Collection I Edit and flagged an early project I did. Brook later reached out to me and asked if I could respond to Schafer’s essay and photos. I accepted the offer.
The project Brook referenced, Red Light Dark Room; Sex, lives & stereotypes, was my very first attempt at collaborative storytelling. I spent a year in residence at St Kilda Gatehouse, a non-profit agency and drop in centre, and put together a book and exhibition with women who work/ed as street-based sex workers.
Red Light Dark Room invited women to participate by telling their own stories in image and interview. It was an attempt to distribute authorship to people who would usually be the subjects of images. In this iteration of collaborative making I handed over cameras, but still took my own photographs to ‘supplement’ the participant images. I also interviewed the women, but I ‘supplemented’ their words with my own reflections.
Time constraints, and funding requirements, as well as a hangover from my years as a professional visual storyteller in an industry preoccupied with the idea of the photographer as a ‘special seer,’ meant my idea of collaborative authorship looked a lot different than it does today. It certainly looked like collaboration, and it was more collaborative than other works my photographic peers might have been making at the time, but the outcomes were still reliant on me using their work to tell the story I pictured. Flaws in the making Red Light Dark Room led me to do a PhD to understand the way the impulse to collaborate can filter into all stages of the photographic process.
I mention my period of study only to point out that I have had the luxury of many years to think about alternative structures of documentary photo-making and experiment with structures of authorship. This period of research has allowed me to write about my theories before I throw work in the world for my peers to discuss and dissect.
I want to give credit to Schafer where it is due, for attempting to find his own methodology of making work, and for moving away from the disingenuousness of documentary — in which photographers rarely reveal the compromises and flaws of the process of making work with people.
Getting (very) close to ones subject
Schafer’s immersive approach is unusual perhaps, but he is not alone in this particular sex/photo methodology. Los Angeles-based photographer Scot Sothern has been making photographs in a similar fashion for a very long time. Sothern’s stark black-and-white images taken of sex workers over a 30-plus year period were published as Lowlife in 2011, which was followed by an autobiographical account of the years in which he made the images in Curb Service: A Memoir in 2013.
Sothern’s work predominantly acts as no-holds-barred, unflinching and unapologetic account of his own drug addiction and use of sex workers — cathartic perhaps, and often poetic despite its ethical ambiguity. Although it is unsettling at times, I have always admired the refreshing candour about how his images were made. Being open about the negotiations around image taking is rare in this industry, which prides itself on ‘truth telling,’ but often fails to acknowledge the dubious ethical paths that all image makers can, and sometimes do, traverse (unless some public vilification is in order). Sothern’s work has never strayed from the revelatory — he bares himself almost as much as he does his subjects — nor does he offer his approach as a unique tactic necessary to the proper telling of these particular stories:
“Men are evil fuckheads who don’t deserve the brute strength they have over women; I’d like my photographs to punctuate that statement. But that doesn’t negate the fact that I’m having fun taking pictures of a naked hot chick.”[1]
While also refreshingly frank about the benefits of fucking desirable women, in addition to photographing them, Schafer’s framing makes me wary:
“But as I packed for that first trip, I understood that in order to do the photo project I wanted to do, to enter and depict their world, I would likely need to become their client. I would become a sex tourist.” (my emphasis)
I read Schafer’s article with interest, because I am fascinated with the hows and whys that drive photographers to make images of sex workers, and appreciated his truthfulness. But even by his statement of decriminalisation advocacy at the end of the article, which is interspersed with images from the series, I still couldn’t divine an answer around the “need” to work in this way. Ultimately, I think failing to clarify why he needed to become a client to reveal a different side of the women who make their living from sex was the major hole in the conceptual development of this work.
Visually, the claim that the work “contrasts quite a lot to other photo essays on prostitutes, which typically place the viewer as a voyeur to a degraded yet exotic existence,” doesn’t really stand up either. Yes, there are some images of the women shopping and child-caring (which are limited stereotypes in themselves) but Schaefer’s subjects are predominantly isolated in the frame (which ties straight into the social isolation we presume for prostitutes), and he over relies on the tropes of photographing sex workers (nudity, silhouettes, isolated body parts). Neither of which support his desire to make images that transcend “the false dichotomy that defines a woman as either madonna or whore.”
How have sex workers appeared in past photography series?
I’m not sure that a comparative analysis is helpful here, but understanding other work on the same topic, or work made with a similar methodology is a good way of situating my own response. For me, Schafer’s collection of images are no more cohesive or revelatory than comparable projects like Paolo Patrizi’s series Migrant Sex Workers, or The Women Of Casa X by Malcolm Venville and Amanda de la Rosa — neither of which employed participation in, and/or payment for prostitution in order to gain access to their subject.
Schafer’s images certainly pale next Erika Langley’s The Lusty Lady, another series for which immersion was the key data gathering technique. In order to photograph the dancers at The Lusty Lady club in Seattle, Langley spent six years as a peep-show dancer there.
Though powerful, Langely’s approach was not determined by her alone. As a freshly graduated photojournalism student she was casting around for the kinds of stories she wanted to tell, and decided on sex work. But when she approached the women-run peep show, management told her if she wanted photograph the performers she would have to become one herself.
The images in Langley’s 1997 book look deeply at the both the eroticism and the mundane of day-to-day sex work, but move beyond the titillating to examine the relationships that are present between the women, as well as the lives the women lead outside of their professional work. The photographs Langley takes are coupled with interviews with the women as well as her own reflections (literal as well as written — she doesn’t exclude her own form from appearing in the edit)[2].
Going beyond the male gaze is not easy, but it is necessary
I certainly find Schafer having sex with the women he photographs significantly more palatable (at least the women benefit financially from their participation) than the approach of photographer Txema Salvans.
Salvans courted controversy for disguising himself as a surveyor to capture women selling sex along the roadsides of Spain’s Mediterranean coast. There is redemption in disclosure, which I can’t find in disguise.
Schafer’s methodology doesn’t produce images or other visual or textual data that give the subjects, and/or show an audience, more than they would usually get. As such, I’m afraid I don’t see the value of integrating himself in this way. I am not adverse to consensual sex work, but in this instance conflating it with photography doesn’t add value.
Although I think his attempts here are rudimentary, Schafer is clearly demonstrating an interest in transcending the observer processes of documentary photography by involving himself intimately in a world he doesn’t initially understand. In this instance, having already committed to an alternative approach, asking the women how they wanted to be photographed, rather than merging the image making with a sexual and financial transaction may have facilitated a more revealing series. Working with them to make the images they wanted, or images they saw as showcasing the full spectrum of their personhood, might have shown us something actually surprising, and given the participants something more than fiscal compensation.
Certainly, it is not always feasible to introduce collaborative authorship to a project. It is one thing to photograph someone, but working together to make images is a process that draws on an entirely different set of skills (not least of all potential compromises in visual language, and the increased investment in relationship building). And honestly, not all people are interested in the process of authoring their own visual story. But for the American man who travels to the Dominican Republic to photograph and fuck women of colour, working in collaborative ways may have addressed some of the deeply problematic power imbalances inherently present in those interactions.
Of course collaboration isn’t the only viable method of alternative authorship; ethnographer-like immersion is obviously a legitimate form of inquiry[3]. The Lusty Lady project is a far more similar approach to the one Schafer is taking, and the work certainly benefited from Langley immersing herself into the world she wanted to photograph. But is hard to compare an instance of a woman becoming a peep show dancer in order to tell the stories of peep show dancers (that then includes her own story) with that of a man frequenting sex workers in order to tell a story of how “disarmingly ordinary” they are as people.
While I might not be sold on his methodology, or the images that it has produced, I utterly agree with Schafer on the decriminalisation of consensual sex work. That is, I believe decisions are best left in the hands of the people who actually work in the industry. I am not a sex worker, and my discomfort with stepping in and telling people’s stories definitively extends to dictating the working conditions and regulations of an industry that I have never worked in. My observation of street-based sex work, over 18-months of getting to know women who work in that section of the profession, is that each and every single person who works as a sex worker has their own unique experience and reflections on the industry. If Amnesty International is advocating that sex workers should use their individual experiences to collectively influence policy I am resolutely for it.
Give subjects a voice, but do not assume it
Amnesty’s draft policy states that sex workers voices are often “obscured or silenced”, which Schafer ostensibly supports. I just wish that he would extend his criticism of the arbitrators, “Ignoring what they say, treating them as victims when they aren’t, presuming they make no choices and have no goals is what is truly dehumanizing,” and apply close scrutiny to the choices about the way he makes work.
It is, at best, contradictory to argue sex workers have the capacity to advocate for the policies that affect them and their livelihoods by putting forth images that represent how he perceives their lives — without even an accompanying word from the women he photographs (the two quotes included in this article are about Schafer himself). And it seems odd that the work got to publication without being challenged on this point, especially in an industry governed by peer review.
But this is the thing — feedback aside, most of figuring this out is time. Duration is critical to understand how to move beyond speaking on behalf of people (Langley, for example, worked on her project for six years), and no one gets it right the first time (though many of us fervently try to sweep those preliminary missteps under the rug). I certainly look back on the Red Light project and worry that the work was presented in ways that contradicted the co-authorship, and reinforced stereotypes.
Schafer is making a refreshing choice in revealing his process, but credit for candour only goes so far. For this particular project, six months in situ and three years of follow up texting might just not be enough time understand and visualise the complexity and nuance of the lives of all women who work as sex workers in Sosúa — however it is authored.
Footnotes
[1] Sothern, Scot. Curb Service: A Memoir. New York: Soft Skull Press, 2013. Print. (pp.240)
[2] In addition to Jim Goldberg’s Raised by Wolves, Langley’s almost-accidental methodology are two projects that showcase the process and outcomes of collaborative photographic processes. Both are worth looking it.
[3] Documentary photographers are increasingly expanding the way they create photographic projects by focusing on the social and relational aspects of picture making. To see some of the many emerging alternatives for traditional authorship structures you can look at the recent crop of the Magnum Foundation’s Photography, Expanded Fellowship, an initiative that supports innovation at the intersection of technology and documentary practice and cultivates interdisciplinary ideation and production. Or read more at Photography As A Social Practice.
