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The Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) at Duke University has awarded the twentieth Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize to photographer Tiana Markova-Gold and writer Sarah Dohrmann.
With the money ‘Markova-Gold and Dohrmann plan to spend three months in Morocco, “living with and documenting the lives of sex workers whose clients are not sex tourists, but are instead fellow Moroccan men.” They will focus on women in prostitution from different economic levels and backgrounds as they engage with them in their homes and in the hotels, clubs, cafes, and streets where they work. While intimate in their approach, it is their hope that the work will portray Morocco—with its unique position as a bridge between Europe and Africa, its role within the MENA region and Islamic society, and as a developing nation grappling with the economic impacts of globalization—within a larger context of the particular vulnerability of women and girls worldwide.’
No small task. Good luck to them.
OTHER PEOPLE’S DIRTY LAUNDRY
"I think the ten minute foot rub I give is a major key to my success . . . If I were to teach Sex Work 101, this would be Lesson One and I wish I had learned it years earlier in my career." Miami Beach 2007. Photograph by Tiana Markova-Gold from the project Other People's Dirty Laundry (Sex Workers Project / Jenna).
Because the work is yet to be embarked upon, CDS presents images from Markova-Gold’s 2007/08 project Other People’s Dirty Laundry and You Must Not Know ‘Bout Me…
The two projects contrast the addictions & abuses, hygiene & preparations of sex workers servicing clients of vastly different economic means and in very different environments; Miami Beach and Washington D.C. contrast frighteningly with the South Bronx and East Harlem.
HOW CLOSE?
The intimacy the photographer has forged here with the sex workers is remarkable but not unique – Scot Sothern, Mimi Chakarova and Dana Popa have all produced projects recently that suggest a trust with their subjects and provide windows into very troubled worlds, especially in the case of Chakarova and Popa who deal with sex-trafficking in Eastern Europe.
This discussion that must necessarily follow the viewing of these projects is complex and difficult and I don’t pretend to have any answers. I only expect an honest discussion.
Prison Photography 