Percolation
I thought I was unaware of Mishka Henner’s ‘No Man’s land‘ when I made Sex-Worker’s Chair. I’m now pretty sure that I saw it at the Photographers Gallery in London beforehand. Having seen his images and moved on, I’m left to wonder what impact seeing it had upon me. I’ve no conscious memory of aping Henner’s work, and yet…
No Man’s Land
By engaging with the online forums and discussion groups in which sex-workers across Spain and Italy are discussed, Henner was able to track the working locations of a multitude of sex-workers.
By then trawling through Google Maps he was then able to find and curate a collection of images of these women and their circumstances, as they had been captured by the Google Car.
What makes this remarkable, is that it is the perfect solution to a multitude of issues that I had been working through before beginning my project. I wanted very much to make a project about sex-work and trafficking, but had kept falling over at the a priori stage.
The language barrier is gone as is the possibility of putting either my subject or myself in greater danger. I had been concerned about their anonymity, but they’re anonymised by Google. I wasn’t sure I had the resources to make the project, and most of all felt worried that my photograph would become another exploitation.
The fact that these photos already existed would have bypassed much of my paralysis. His work accurately captures the profundity, mundanity, and some of the nightmare of sex-work and sex-workers. Each is photographed in their sparse and liminal spaces, under the baking sun, surrounded by trash.
They become like road furniture or service stations, simultaneously remarkable and unremarkable, doing their business not furtively, at night, but openly, honestly, and with our assumed consent.
That he curated the work from existing pictures, pictures he did not take, briefly raises some interesting questions about authorship and what it means to be a photographer in the 21st Century, but his process so neatly solves all the problems I had been battling with, that I can only view it as a clever use of a tool, to communicate a truth.
When the book first came out, he was threatened with legal action, with death, accused of endangering the women included, and of exploiting them further. All the things I was concerned about when I began considering my project.