General & Miscellaneous Entertainment Biography, Women's Biography - Strippers & Prostitutes, Portrait Photography - Nudes, General & Miscellaneous Performing Arts

Lapdancer

Name: Lapdancer
Author: Julian Beasley
ISBN: 9781576871393

by Julian Beasley

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Overview

Determined to supplement her meager income as a novice photographer, Juliana Beasley embarked on an eight-year odyssey as a professional nude dancer, specializing in “lap dances,” during which a woman dances above a seated customer, erotically brushing against his body. From New York to Reno, Beasley worked in over two dozen strip clubs, dancing for twenty dollars a song, experiencing the rewards and pitfalls of the profession: variable income, flexible schedules, emotional and physical exhaustion, sex industry camaraderie—and an arrest for prostitution.

Though she was a professional dancer, Beasley never forgot the purpose of her studies in documentary work. Along with negligees and stilettos, she regularly brought a camera to the clubs, and began recording testimonies from the managers, dancers, and patrons. The result is Lapdancer, an inside look at the world of professional nude dancing. Culled from thousands of photographs and hours of interviews, Beasley documents an oft-derided but rarely understood culture—one tightly codified by rules and behavior, and peopled with characters from a David Lynch film.

Through these pictures and interviews Beasley—a sex industry Virgil—guides us through the erotic dancer circuit, detailing its ruthless economic underpinnings and the intimate, anonymous currency between dancer and customer. Here, at what was once society’s fringe, Beasley depicts mainstream culture’s new evolving definitions of sexuality, gender politics, capitalism, therapy—even love.

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Editorials

The New Yorker

A cheerful sign photographed on the wall of a house in Nevada in 1987 reads, “SMILE: It’s the 2nd Best Thing You Can Do with Your Lips.” The risqué wall hanging is the only hint that the room in the photograph is the otherwise genteel parlor of a brothel called the Shamrock, in the desert town of Lathrop Wells. The picture is one of more than a hundred and fifty views of largely unpopulated rooms in Brothels of Nevada, a collection of work by the architectural photographer Timothy Hursley, who documents America’s legal sex trade and also American vernacular style, from oversize trailer homes painted bubble-gum pink to shag-carpeted bedrooms where blow-up dolls peek out from closets paneled in faux wood.

A strong sense of place is absent from Lapdancer, a collection of snapshots by Juliana Beasley, who started stripping in 1992 to support her photography career. The two worlds converged, and Beasley ended up taking thousands of photographs of the “gentleman’s club” circuit. A selection of those images, along with interviews with strippers and Beasley’s own text—which manages to be both gimlet-eyed and self-absorbed—offer as much backstage access as most readers would ever want. In some cases, the lens is only inches away from a dancer’s bare breast or the muzzy face of a drunk patron. Over the course of the book, the nudity loses most of its charge. What remains is a sense of pathetic obsession that is typified by the letter reproduced on the back cover: “Dear Brandy, Such is your power of intoxication that I have spent two restless nights now remembering your performances as ‘foxy lady.’” ~ (Mark Rozzo)

Publishers Weekly

During much of the 1990s, there was a hidden voyeur in the strip clubs of the East Coast tristate area: a stripper with a camera. A graduate of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and an assistant to Annie Leibovitz, Beasley danced and stripped for $20 a lap. While trying to save up money, and avoid exhaustion and arrest, she turned her camera on fellow dancers and the customers who paid for them. More than 150 of her full-color photographs are gathered here, none altered, capturing everything from hilariously subdued patrons to wryly mocking workers in various states of undress. Over nine years, Beasley's camera acquired a kind of nonchalance that avoids oversensationalizing the clubs. Men stare at dancers like deer in the headlights; dancers take smoke breaks while clad raffishly in (recently acquired?) men's underwear. Every sort of awkward, lurid position people get into in strip clubs is unblinkingly revealed in a brash layout of full-page photos, while occasional and commentary by dancers, patrons or Beasley herself are moving and honest. Beasley notes that many patrons were "pleased with the role reversal, with being objectified"-the kind of paradox that makes this book a luridly shrewd pleasure. (June) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.