The Lusty Lady

"A sliding door rises up in the small square window and opens unto a brightly carpeted room. On the other side of the glass, five women dance inside a mirrored box. On is lying down on the carpet with her legs spread wide, another is doing the splits vertically against a mirror. You can see the peering faces of men through the row of little square windows opposite. Disco music blares out..."

When the American photographer Erika Langley moved to Seattle, she discovered The Lusty Lady, a peep-show run by women, ex-dancers who know the trade from within. She asked the management whether she could take photographs of the girls. They told her if she wanted to photograph the dancers, she'd have to become one of them. Langley took the dare and what started out as a reportage turned into a five-year project. "I wound up becoming a stripper myself. And I lived it, and loved it for five years."

In The Lusty Lady Langley combines her photographs, interviews, and diary entries to tell a story of women in charge of their own sexual powers, of strength, friendship, and mutual support, of ordinary women with husbands and lovers and children, and of the fragility of customers, whose sexual needs are often viewed with sympathy and humor and served-observing the Lusty Lady's "no-contact" regulation-in a spirit of supply and demand. Langley sheds new light on an often stigmatized and stereotyped community, and in doing so, learns a lot about herself. A candid, often surprising, and affectionate view of a hidden world at the margins of society.