JULIANA BEASLEY

JULIANA BEASLEY /// LAPDANCER
" In 1992, two years after graduating from NYU's photography program, Juliana Beasley, now 33, desperate to supplement her meager income as novice photographer in a comptetitive market and inspired by the thought of good money at flexible hours, embarked on an eight year odyssey as a professional nude dancer. Specializing in "lap dances" --in which a woman dances above a seated customer, erotically brushing against his body-- she worked in over two dozen strip clubs in the United States, from New York to Reno, dancing for twenty dollars a head, and sharing the rewards and pitfalls of the profession: good earnings, poor earnings, emotional and physical exhaustion.

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 her 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.
(...)
The result is Lapdancer, a book giving her insider-view of the world of professional nude dancers. Culled from thousands of photographs and dozens of hours of interviews, Beasley provides an unsentimental, unblinking look inside an often caricatured 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. (...)" (JULIANA BEASLEY)

SELECTION OF WORKS FROM OTHER SERIES BY JULIANA BEASLEY

☁ JULIANA BEASLEY
☁ JULIANA BEASLEY'S BLOG
☁ JULIANA BEASLEY @ SAATCHI
☁ INTERVIEW WITH JULIANA BEASLEY @ CONSCIENTIOUS