STRIPPERS

THE QUESTION OF VULNERABILITY

From 1972 to 1975, Susan Meiselas spent her summers photographing and interviewing women who performed striptease for small town carnivals in New England, Pennsylvania and South Carolina. As she followed carnivals from town to town, she portrayed the dancers on stage and off, photographing their public performances as well as their private lives. She also taped interviews with the dancers, their boyfriends, the show managers and paying customers. The work was published in the book Carnival Strippers (Whitney Museum of American art, New York, 2nd ed., 2003).

This heartbreaking work by Meiselas, an amalgam of pain and power embodied in grainy, gritty black and white photographs, inspired me to probe their visual and emotional secrets by transforming very small fragments of the photographs into other artistic languages, fragile and unstable: watercolors and printmaking. The works in this group are my homage to Susan Meiselas and to the Carnival Strippers.