‘she can’t see her husband’s other wives anymore. That’s it—no more jealousy.’ ‘Oh, I see. That’s a woman’s paradise: no more jealousy. You mean she can’t even see the ninety-two virgins?’ ‘Especially not them.’ That made me laugh so hard I was unable to come.
Being a whore, Mary Magdalene reminds me of my mother.
Not that my mother was a whore, no, but people called her that because she frequently invited prostitutes into our home and defended them in court. Little wonder that, thirty years later, I did the reportage called Whore Sons and Daughters —visiting two dozen different countries, using hundreds of rolls of film, asking thousands of questions…What the hookers emphasised more than anything else was…their clients’ vulnerability and need to talk. Eventually I cameto see prostitution as akin to psychoanalysis. Short but repeatable encounters whose terms were fixed in advance—one person paying the other not to talk, the horizontal position relaxing inhibitions… ‘Basically,’ a gorgeous African-American call-girl once told me in New York, ‘the john pays you for the right to be a little boy again. A little tyrant is more like it. Talking without listening, taking without giving…But afterwards, if he’s not in too much of a hurry, he’ll sometimes tell you things he tells no one else…You’d be surprised. It can be very moving. Sometimes they start to cry and you can sense the kid they used to be…Can’t get too close, though, or they’ll switch back to scorn.’
The whole tentacular, wildly lucrative prostitution and pornography industry, which makes billions of dollars by portraying fertile young females as being sterile and infinitely cooperative, reflects not men’s irrepressible desire for women but just the opposite: their need to keep them at bay. Whether the anonymous woman is in a luxury hotel room, a sordid dive or on screen, the message is the same: Do as I say. Desire me, adore me and admire me but don’t threaten to devour me, don’t bleed, above all, don’t make babies.
Asked how they chose their profession, few hookers mentioned anything vaguely synonymous with desire or pleasure; all, on the other hand, mentioned money. That’s why so many of my photos included close-ups of cash—bills changing hands, being slipped into pockets and wallets, stashed, checked and rechecked, even kissed. Yes, whether for good reasons or bad, prostitutes care deeply about money; nine times out of ten that’s what they think about when they squander their intimacy, when the client is on them and in them, seeking oblivion. The stranger’s congested face is almost invariably replaced by the faces of their parents, their children, or else the sweetheart they hope to return to once they’ve earned enough money. For some women, cash getscaught up in a vicious circle between pimp and coke and fuck; the coke helps them survive the fuck that brings in the cash that pays the pimp that keeps them in coke—those women are really lost.
My project was more than a challenge, it was a contradiction in terms: to use photography, the art of the present moment, to activate the women’s pasts and futures. That’s why I took photos of them with their kids. Virtually all of them carry around snapshots of the person they love more than anything in the world, the child for whose future’s sake they initially agreed to rent out its former home, their bodies. First I’d photograph the women, then I’d photograph the snapshot of their child, blowing it up and framing the two faces together—the same size, but one rendered blurry and ghostlike by the enlargement.
Throughout my childhood I had seen whores go traipsing through our home with one or several kids in tow, so when I heard about the antinomy between mother and whore, in an Introduction to Psychology lecture my first year at Concordia, I burst out laughing in the middle of the auditorium.
Tearing herself away from Magdalene,
Being a whore, Mary Magdalene reminds me of my mother.
Not that my mother was a whore, no, but people called her that because she frequently invited prostitutes into our home and defended them in court. Little wonder that, thirty years later, I did the reportage called Whore Sons and Daughters —visiting two dozen different countries, using hundreds of rolls of film, asking thousands of questions…What the hookers emphasised more than anything else was…their clients’ vulnerability and need to talk. Eventually I cameto see prostitution as akin to psychoanalysis. Short but repeatable encounters whose terms were fixed in advance—one person paying the other not to talk, the horizontal position relaxing inhibitions… ‘Basically,’ a gorgeous African-American call-girl once told me in New York, ‘the john pays you for the right to be a little boy again. A little tyrant is more like it. Talking without listening, taking without giving…But afterwards, if he’s not in too much of a hurry, he’ll sometimes tell you things he tells no one else…You’d be surprised. It can be very moving. Sometimes they start to cry and you can sense the kid they used to be…Can’t get too close, though, or they’ll switch back to scorn.’
The whole tentacular, wildly lucrative prostitution and pornography industry, which makes billions of dollars by portraying fertile young females as being sterile and infinitely cooperative, reflects not men’s irrepressible desire for women but just the opposite: their need to keep them at bay. Whether the anonymous woman is in a luxury hotel room, a sordid dive or on screen, the message is the same: Do as I say. Desire me, adore me and admire me but don’t threaten to devour me, don’t bleed, above all, don’t make babies.
Asked how they chose their profession, few hookers mentioned anything vaguely synonymous with desire or pleasure; all, on the other hand, mentioned money. That’s why so many of my photos included close-ups of cash—bills changing hands, being slipped into pockets and wallets, stashed, checked and rechecked, even kissed. Yes, whether for good reasons or bad, prostitutes care deeply about money; nine times out of ten that’s what they think about when they squander their intimacy, when the client is on them and in them, seeking oblivion. The stranger’s congested face is almost invariably replaced by the faces of their parents, their children, or else the sweetheart they hope to return to once they’ve earned enough money. For some women, cash getscaught up in a vicious circle between pimp and coke and fuck; the coke helps them survive the fuck that brings in the cash that pays the pimp that keeps them in coke—those women are really lost.
My project was more than a challenge, it was a contradiction in terms: to use photography, the art of the present moment, to activate the women’s pasts and futures. That’s why I took photos of them with their kids. Virtually all of them carry around snapshots of the person they love more than anything in the world, the child for whose future’s sake they initially agreed to rent out its former home, their bodies. First I’d photograph the women, then I’d photograph the snapshot of their child, blowing it up and framing the two faces together—the same size, but one rendered blurry and ghostlike by the enlargement.
Throughout my childhood I had seen whores go traipsing through our home with one or several kids in tow, so when I heard about the antinomy between mother and whore, in an Introduction to Psychology lecture my first year at Concordia, I burst out laughing in the middle of the auditorium.
Tearing herself away from Magdalene,
Similar Books
