Photographing Past Stereotype – The New York Times

Photographing Past Stereotype

The evolution of the photographer Cristina De Middel maps the complex process of shedding clichés.

Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/27/magazine/photographing-past-stereotype.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

In 2015, the Spanish-Belgian photographer Cristina De Middel posed herself an obvious but underasked question. In most photographic projects about sex work, it is the faces and bodies of women we see: their strength, weakness, courage and suffering. Where are the men? De Middel wanted to interview men who had paid for sex and photograph them in the kinds of hotel rooms to which they would take female sex workers. So she put an ad in Extra and O Dia, two local newspapers in Rio de Janeiro. She was astonished by the volume of response: More than 100 men showed interest.