How Beasley!

When I'm scouring other people's online photographic portfolios, I always click on CV and Bio sections to check out how old they are. This is usually a mistake as discovering we're the same age/ I'm 5 to 10 years older and less than an 1/16th as accomplished/focussed/recognized (dammit!) can leave me feeling sorry for myself. Bitterness aside, I don't need to tell you there are some fascinating photographs out there.

Yesterday one of my colleagues alerted me to Juliana Beasley's site. Best of all she's almost 10 years older than me, although she did spend some of those years assisting Annie Liebowitz . . .

Juliana worked as stripper for a little while and somehow managed to get a camera into the club. She also managed to take a few more than half-decent photographs which have been collected in a book called Lapdancer.

Besides these Beasley has pictures of the mentally ill, victims of hurricane Katrina, Cambodian kids with less legs than they should have. . . you probably get the idea. I suppose her whole thing is "The Other".

Regardless of your reaction to this type of photography (by which I mean do you think it's exploitative and crass or is it about truth and enoblement? Probably somewhere inbetween, non?) it would be hard to argue that Beasley's images are dull.

Perhaps the lapdancer pics could work as a metaphor for her entire project, with us, the audience, encouraged to identify with the shocked/fascinated/shamed faces of the men in the club who can't tear their eyes away from the underwear and the flesh beneath.

But I could be getting a bit carried away.

Besides all this, I like the fact that in her Jen Bekman gallery bio Beasley mentions that she spends her spare time dancing with her dog. Whether she is as "talented" as Mary Ray, the undisputed star of Crufts 2008, has yet to be proven.