“It took months to get access to my first clubs, and find my footing. No one quite understood what I was doing there. But I came in week after week. I helped to collect the dollar bills littering the stage. The dancers began to warm to me. I showed them my work, and they liked how I saw them. Soon they were volunteering to pose on the pole. I know I’ve been changed by the experience. I’ve taken on some of their audacity.”
– Elizabeth Waterman
Over a period of five years, Los Angeles-based fine-art photographer spent her Saturday nights in clubs in five U.S. cities, photographing and building a rapport with the strippers and exotic dancers who make their livelihoods there. Images from this extended nightlife foray were first introduced in her 2021 coffee-table book MONEYGAME (XYZ Books). In a story on the project, the Los Angeles Times wrote that Waterman “recast the lives of exotic dancers through a female gaze.”
MONEYGAME: THE SHOW, the first-ever exhibition of images from this portfolio, opens at ArtBarLA on Saturday, July 23 with an artist’s reception from 6-9PM. A live pole dancing performance will be among the evening’s festivities. The show presents photographs published in the book, and alternates that have never been exhibited. Taken primarily on 35mm and 120mm film, the selections include shots from all the cities Waterman visited to compile the project: Los Angeles, New York, Las Vegas, Miami, and New Orleans.
By necessity, strippers and exotic dancers are highly competitive athletes, and charismatic performers. Waterman celebrates her subjects’ skills, humanity, and commitment to mastering their art in service of larger life goals. Very often, they are women using income from the profession as part of a well-considered strategy to pay off student loans, raise a family, buy a home, or launch a business. Some of the images present them offstage, in the context of their personal lives.
A portion of the proceeds from sales of prints from the MONEYGAME portfolio will benefit https://swopusa.org/, a national grassroots social justice network dedicated to the fundamental human rights of sex workers and their communities, focusing on ending violence and stigma through education, community building, and advocacy.
www.elizabethwaterman.com
