November 2008
November 20, 2008
The "first deadly sin" book project
It took me five years to shoot this document of the sex industry, and it consumed me for several years more.
I almost gave up before I made my first image. I had spent most of my money in the course of three weeks in Manila, since my contacts could not deliver what they had promised. My Nikon FM2 was loaded with black and white film, but there was nothing to photograph. My deadline was approaching and I had less than a week to find a brothel that would allow me to take photographs.
One phone call made all the difference. It came from Estonia. A businessperson in Tallinn wanted some investor contacts. Before he hung up, he asked what I was doing. When I explained, he said he would call back in one hour. The outcome of that call was a number that took me on a journey in a police jeep to a villa in Makati, in Manila’s business district.
We all think about sex. In a lifetime of working as a professional photographer I have met very few successful people, in any field, who lack a strong sex drive, even if many of them hide it well. The global sex industry, measured in turnover and employees, is probably the world’s biggest. Yet it has generally been poorly reported. The images it generates are distorted by a variety of agendas. At one extreme – in pornography – dehumanised and codified to the point of boredom and sterility. At another extreme – in NGO literature – misery magnified to serve fund-raising purposes. I didn’t want to take a standpoint. I wanted to photograph life as I saw it.
I did very little research before I started this project in 1996, and all I knew was that I was going to have to give it time. I was careful to analyse any situation I found myself in, find an ally – someone who knew the place, a medium with access who was trusted. It didn’t matter whom, so long as they could help me build trust.
Trust is key when you are trying to document a time and place. It is everything. I would always make repeat visits. The best images come when the people you are documenting relax and forget about your camera. I took pictures and developed them overnight, returning the next day and giving them to the girls or their clients, or whoever the subject was. This way people could see what I was doing, how I was approaching the work, and they appreciated it.
It became easier as my body of work grew. I would take a stack of 8” x 10” photographs down to a brothel, and let the people there go through them. It amazed me how effective this was at getting people on side.
I did not want to further exploit anyone. I was always scrupulous about getting permission from my subjects, even if it had already been granted by the mamasan or brothel owner. If a woman or a client asked me to crop or destroy a photograph, I always did so. But in most cases people wanted their story told. Everyone has a story, and the urge to tell it is something few of us can resist.
For five years after that phone call from Estonia, I roamed the world, mixing travel stories and corporate work, while waiting for access to brothels, porn productions and sex clubs. To protect my family and myself, I changed my name, and for a few years, it said Johansson in my passport. It was impossible to work full time, since I had no sponsors. But, if I sensed something new around the corner, I took the turning. Of course, some of the best images never made it onto film because I did not have permission. But I knew from the beginning that this was the price I would have to pay for treating my subjects with respect.
The project took me across Europe, Japan, Philippines, Thailand, USA, Brazil, and even the Amazon, where I got no images. I travelled around northern Europe with a pagan commune that practiced full time what its members worshipped most. I spent a month in Rotterdam with Sandra, a wonderful woman who was hooked on heroin and struggled to make it to the end of each day. In a brothel in Nevada, I met Kara, who called herself Nicole and had a dream of becoming an art student.
The last images I made were in Pattaya, Thailand, where I followed some young European sex tourists a few days before the new millennium. I tried to go on after this, and spent five months in Bulgaria attempting to document the trafficking of women between Eastern and Western Europe. I met some criminals who agreed to try and arrange for me to be smuggled together with a group of Ukrainian prostitutes. It was an arrangement that never came to fruition, and after five months and no images I sensed that my journey had come to an end.
The images I offer you in this book are a document of that journey.
Gerhard Jörén
Hong Kong, February 10, 2008
