Yoshiichi Hara – Stripper Zukan
1982
Since 1975 Yoshiichi Hara has made more than fifteen hundred photographs of strip-tease artists – and Stripper Zukan is regarded as the starting point of this lifelong project. In 1981 Hara held his first ‘stripper’ exhibition at the Ginza Nikon Salon Gallery in Tokyo – featuring the photographs of two hundred strippers created after visiting some three hundred Tokyo-area strip clubs. The next year he published Stripper Zukan, which comprised of only sixty-five portraits from that series, a book inspired by E.J. Bellocq’s Storyville Portraits (Little Brown & Co, 1970, with images championed – and posthumously printed – by Lee Friedlander).
One immediately sees that each of the book’s portraits is from the clubs’ ‘greenrooms’. The greenroom functions as a portal between the stripper’s often-mundane life and the bright stage-lights – a place where a woman metamorphoses into a stripper. Despite the photographer’s presence the women of Stripper Zukan appear relaxed, innocent, and defenseless – alone in their greenroom, protected from the outside world, their true selves before becoming fantasy objects.。
Stripper Zukan presents a variety of images of women comfortably napping or lazily smoking – often with too much makeup on a stressed face, but posing proudly with a cheerful smile. There are also various body-types, with too small breasts, fat bellies, skinny arms and legs, and peculiar tattoos – in underwear or showy sequined costumes. In the background may be club notices stuck on the walls or an unmade futon. One discovers the strippers’ fatigue, bravado, sadness, and coquetry throughout Hara’s work. You cannot help but wonder how Hara achieved such free and relaxed expressions – and why he chose to show us these greenroom scenes instead of more typical stage shots.
When Hara was eighteen-years old he traveled to an old spa town in northern Japan and found a strip-club there. A middle-aged stripper, with her fat belly, was standing on the stage – at the side of stage a child (possibly her own child) was roaming about. Hara lost any sexual desire associated with this art because this stripper remained him of his mother – and that the child could be himself. This triggered his introspection and empathy that – under different circumstances – she could have been his mother.
In short, Hara understood that strippers each have individual lives behind the bright lights – and he recognized that behind their attitude and toughness, these women, who used their own bodies to earn a living, had everyday, often ordinary, lives, needs, and dreams.
In 2013 Hara held an exhibition of vintage prints at Gallery Sekka in Tokyo. As he looked back on his early days he said, “Most of the strippers I met in the past were older than me. And now they are growing older, but I’m sure they still strive to maintain a shadow of how they once looked. I also have aged – I’m already sixty-five years old. I want to show you how the photographs I made and those days haven’t changed. They remain portraits of proud strippers who I love very much”.
Hara’s sincere respect for strippers and their lives can be felt in these words. He praises their spirit and intellect as they try to first be authentic women before dancing as (male fantasy) strippers. In addition he admires their courage as they live hard lives while conscious that they are regarded only as sexual objects to their viewers.
With his sympathy for every stripper he met – and for her life behind the stage, Hara persistently focused on the greenrooms, where strippers show their naked faces as real women. By arranging their portraits in a simple ‘zukan’-style (illustrated reference book) Hara presents anonymous identities, but elevates these lives, and their special occupation, into the universality of being any women.
– Natsuko Oda
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