REVEAL (2016 - ongoing)
In REVEAL, photographs of Kitty Tornado (stage name), along with her writings, form an ever-evolving series visualizing her on and off-stage as not only a burlesque performer, but also as my best friend, muse, travel companion, and creative collaborator. Conveying at once her armor and vulnerability, Kitty bears the scars from childhood surgeries — namely, a liver transplant at age thirteen — and continues to navigate times of chronic illness and bodily upheaval.
I met Kitty shortly after she and her partner David moved from rural Michigan to Chicago in 2014, and she introduced me to burlesque by way of inviting me to one of her performances early on in her performance career. Shortly thereafter, I began photographing her at home and in shows.
In these intimate portraits, we see Kitty in her many lived roles, appearing on stage in feathers and sequins, drenched in colorful lighting, and as a performer in her own life — some in process of performance preparation, others in moments of pause at a table, in a shower, on a bed. We observe Kitty alongside members of her family, her husband, and me. Working together since 2016, Kitty has become habituated to the presence of my camera and acquiesces to perform scenes of her daily life, which can be joyous, dramatic, exhausting, and mundane all at once.
Secret Mermaid (2020 - ongoing)
Secret Mermaid portrays some of the unseen labors, rituals, and self-taught abilities behind creating and sustaining the magic of sexual fantasies. Through photographs and interview text, my friend and fellow burlesque performer Secret Mermaid (stage name) shares her experiences as a go-go dancer, fetish model, adult content creator, and full-service sex worker. Together, we work intuitively to show facets of her life and in turn demystify many preconceptions about what sex work and sex workers look like.
”Sex work” is an expansive umbrella term for the exchange of sexual services, performances, or products for compensation, yet photographic history often depicts sex trades myopically and reductively, as solely escorting or exotic dancing (i.e. stripping). Moreover, the medium consistently pictures sex workers as victims living in dire conditions, with no perceptible life or aspiration beyond the day-to-day hustle.
Secret Mermaid reminds viewers that, for the many who choose it, sex work, like any job under capitalism, has its rewards and challenges. Moreover, sex workers do not have a single story.
Days of Rust (2021 - ongoing)
Interested in the fluidity of performance and public vs. private in relation to photographic portraiture, Days of Rust centers me as a constant performer, even in solitude. As a sex worker and burlesque performer, I assert myself as subject and author through self-portraits made in my apartment, seemingly away from brightly lit stages, rowdy crowds, and being looked at.
Although my burlesque striptease is live and in-person, since starting my OnlyFans in 2020 (in the wake of venue closures), I have exclusively created and sold more explicit adult content online. My modest home (or transient dwelling) thus becomes the ambiguous backdrop for the fantasies I create. Furniture, linens, and houseplants are embellished in light or swallowed up in shadows; banal, every day fixtures are infused with allure and mystery.
At times, my eye contact meets yours... Alongside these arresting confrontations, my presence permeates the living space through traces of greasy fingerprints and creases in silk pillowcases. Windows and doors appear throughout as elusive barriers — or entry points — to the outside’s inevitable gaze. I can never quite escape the performance.
Show & Tell (2021 - ongoing)
In Show & Tell, I interview and photograph my peers on stages and in show venues, in their homes, and outside in public spaces, creating my own continuous, informal visual archive of contemporary Chicago burlesque.
In their own words, performers share their nuanced perspectives and demonstrate both the pleasure and complication inherent in performing burlesque, an artform that, since its inception, relentlessly challenges the status quo. Through reveals, and through bodies unafraid of taking up space for their own sake, burlesque artists embrace masquerade and sexual freedom.
Although still a fringe artform wherever it is found, burlesque has had a home in the city for over 150 years. Chicago has a long history of prominent performers, including Syrian-born Fahreda Mazar Spyropoulos, aka “Little Egypt,” who performed a dance then referred to as the “hoochie-coochie” — better known today as the “belly dance” — at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition.
In the early 1900s, Chicago’s many burlesque theaters were located around the periphery of the central business district, with a significant cluster of theaters lined along South State Street between Van Buren and Polk Streets. Theaters soon populated West Madison Street near Halsted and in the Levee nightclub district near 22nd and South State Streets. Burlesque’s overall popularity oscillated throughout the 1900s, with a strong resurgence in the 1990s in the form of Neo-burlesque, a revival of the classic 1870s-1930s British and North American burlesque style that is performed across pockets of urban and rural America.
Currently, Chicago is home to dozens of burlesque, boylesque, vaudeville and sideshow, drag king and queen, pole, sing-and-strip, and live band burlesque productions as well as over a hundred active performers in every genre. During its annual burlesque pageant and convention held in Las Vegas, Nevada, the Burlesque Hall of Fame crowned Chicago’s own Ms. B LaRose “Mx. Exotic World 2024,” a top honor in international burlesque.