|
Joseph
Rodríguez
Flesh Life: Sex in Mexico City
drkrm.gallery
is pleased to announce the first Los Angeles exhibition of Flesh Life:
Sex in Mexico City, the work of New York-based photographer Joseph
Rodríguez. The show is comprised of twenty-five 11x14
black and white photographs and runs from February 14 through March 15,
2009, with an opening reception on Saturday evening, February 14, from
7-10 p.m.
From Nezahualcoyotl,
the largest working-class suburb on earth, to La Condesa, Mexico City’s
hipster hangout, putas and putos stroll the streets,
cruising for johns and surviving on their wit, born out of true desperation.
These men, women, and everyone in-between are sex-workers in a country
where extra-marital sex is considered a mortal sin, and, confoundingly,
where they ply their trade without official reprisal. In Mexico, macho
husbands consort with other men, and virgencitas are anything but.
Joseph Rodríguez confronts these contradictions head-on in
Flesh Life: Sex in Mexico City. In Rodríguez’s
series of startlingly intimate black-and-white photographs we encounter
a re-sexualized and re-spiritualized country in flux, embracing religious
dogma while discarding taboos that once shrouded sex in a haze of artifice,
euphemism, and history. Rodríguez’s beautiful and brutally
honest images suggest a culture in which spirit and flesh have always
been inextricably intertwined.
| "Spirit,
flesh: in the end the same quest, born of a crumbling economy
and identity. The single most apparent sign is the proliferation
in prostitution, an ‘outing’ of what has always existed,
but furtively. The government has officially admitted that it
is impossible to rein in the sex trade; Mexico City is not busy
busting working women and men, but formulating legal and health
guidelines for sex-workers." |
Internationally recognized photographer Joseph Rodríguez was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. His work has appeared in such publications as The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, GQ, Newsweek, Esquire, and Der Spiegel. He has received awards and grants from the Open Society Institute, National Endowment for the Arts, Rockefeller Foundation, and New York State Foundation for the Arts. He was awarded Picture of the Year by the National Press Photographers Association in 1990, 1992, 1996, and 2002. His work has been widely exhibited, domestically and internationally. Rodríguez teaches at New York University and the International Center of Photography.
Joseph
Rodríguez website
Spirit
and Flesh - Mexico‘s Sexual Revolution
On display concurrently in the Project Room::
Philip
Fagan
The Business of Pleasure : New York City Brothels
Of his many life journeys, from India to Afghanistan, it was Philip Fagan’s
stint working for a chain of New York City brothels in the 1980’s
and early 1990's that provided him with the unique opportunity to visually
document a hidden taboo of American life.
"Powerful
photographs can change our perceptions and bring us into worlds
most of us would never venture into. Fagan’s photographs about
the brothels speak for themselves. His photographs record an existence
most people will never understand or be eye witnesses to. These
are real women, with real stories and real lives. Not only are many
of Phillip’s photographs elegantly seen, and reveal deeper
truths about the world of prostitution but they are as much about
him as they are about the women he choose to work with, defend and
honor in his pictures. -- Anthony Friedkin, from the introduction to the book Business of Pleasure: NYC Brothels |
Fagan
spent eleven years on Manhattan’s East side in “the business
of pleasure.” His extraordinarily rare access enabled him to befriend
and photograph many of the women who earned their living in the sex trade.
“I did not photograph the girls as an essay, or as an exploitive
study of girls in a lowly profession,” Fagan explains. “I
photographed the girls because I spent all my time, almost 24-7, with
them.”
Swing Shift 513 3rd Ave., NYC c.1987
This reprise exhibition of stark, gritty and suprisingly touching images
reveals the everyday world of working girls. Rarely does Fagan's camera
intrude; it is merely a voyeur, a welcome partner. These candid and straight
forward portraits are reminescent of Diane Arbus’ pictures of people
on the fringes of society combined with Ernest J. Bellocq’s Storyville
Photographs taken in the Red Light District of New Orleans in the
1900’s.
click
here for video slideshow
The
Business of Pleasure: New York City Brothels
Photographs by Philip Fagan
Introduction by Anthony Friedkin
Softcover
10x8
inches, Perfect-bound 80 pages
Signed $40 (pre-order)
|
|
