En cours de chargement...
"... It's getting near show time. Don't be shy, take your hands out of your pockets, take your money out of your wallets. Get a little yellow ticket here. Go on in the inside. Rest your elbows on the stage and look up into the whole, the whole goddamn show. Show time ! Where they strip to please, not to tease ! " 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. Excerpts from these interviews, along with over seventy of Meiselas's black-and-white photographs, were first published in the 1976 original edition of this book.
Meiselas's frank depiction of the lives of carnival strippers - in both images and words - brought a hidden world to public attention. It also revealed the complicated emotions of the strippers whose printed comments express conflicting attitudes toward their work. Produced during the early years of the women's movement, Carnival Strippers reflects the struggle for identity and self-esteem that characterized a complex era of change.
In the fifty years since Meiselas began photographing the girl shows, attitudes toward documentary photography, public sexuality, and feminism have evolved, but the power of these pictures remains unchanged.
