Capturing the magic and the mundanity of London’s strip clubs
Photography by Bronwen Parker-Rhodes
Bronwen Parker-Rhodes: Long before I met Emily, I had been trying for some time to make a documentary about my experiences as a stripper and the incredible women I worked with, but I kept coming up against problems. Many of the really interesting women with really valuable stories would never appear on camera – but they would agree to do anonymous voice interviews.
ED: The women we met dancing are so incredibly funny and courageous and they have this amazing ingenuity. There’s definitely a caricature stripper-ness that some of the women tap into, almost as a power source. But you also encounter a lot in the book that doesn’t evince those typical ideas of how strippers are often portrayed.
BPR: I have worked in strip clubs on and off for the past 20 years, and have been photographing my friends throughout that time. I was never really thinking about where these images would end up, I just wanted to capture this fascinating world for myself. Like the interviews in the book, the photography is attempting to show the raw unfiltered beauty of stripping.
ED: My memories are a strange montage of all those things … the mundane elements, the gross detritus in the changing rooms, the odd, deathly quiet daytime shifts. But, as Bronwen said, the remarkable conversations where you’re drawing on this whole lexicon of very specific shared experience and it’s so funny. Also, the sensation of dancing on stage which was sometimes so exhilarating, like channelling something really thrilling and uninhibited ...
ED: Pole dancing has become much more mainstream in some ways and I’ve always found that most people are deeply interested rather than shocked if you say you used to be a dancer, they want to ask a million questions. But I’m not sure if that’s symptomatic of sex work becoming more accepted or if it’s of people becoming more prurient.
EG: At the same time, we’re also seeing new kinds of approaches to stripping, like Harpies – the first LGBTQ+ strip club in Europe, which operates as an event hosted inside another strip club. So it’s like a lot of censorship and a bit of progression happening simultaneously. What do you think the future of strip clubs in the UK looks like?
EG: One dancer talks about the political climate around sex work in the post-#MeToo world, saying that women’s rights have become much more of a mainstream talking point but – and I’m paraphrasing slightly – ‘in reality, it’s women’s rights for good women but not the sluts‘.
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