Private Pleasures
by Cammie Toloui

Opening 5 September 2024 

San Francisco, early 1990s. Cammie Toloui is a young photojournalism student. Her practice requires costly equipment, which her part time day-job doesn’t pay well enough to cover. The $22/hr offered by the Lusty Lady Theater –  a local strip-club run by women in the North Beach district – convinces her to audition. She switches her name to Tasha and trades her bleached hair for a dark and wavy wig. An official “Lusty”, she starts secretly photographing the space. “I smuggled my camera into work and got the courage to ask my first customer if I could take his picture, offering him a free dildo show in exchange” writes Toloui in $5 for 3 minutes, a book she later published and dedicated to this series. Taking the price equation as its title, the latter bears witness to the equivocal status of the club – a space of entertainment for some, a workplace for others. It takes us from the bar to the backstage, all the way into the undressing room and the Private Pleasures booth, where one-on-ones are performed behind a pane of glass. In its reflection, we meet The Dildo Man, The Cop, The Slug, The Roly-Poly – all characters of a black and white portrait gallery, baroque-like in its dramatic lighting, revealing a broad spectrum of sexuality, fetishes, and often-private aspects of masculinity. Illicit in nature, hidden from the boss's eye, these images both sabotage and replicate the transactional dynamics of the club. They’re the result of a bargain, but also that of a collaboration. Toloui strips, the clients pose – these moments strangely echoing one another, enabling a reciprocity in how the gaze is distributed. "I felt affinity with these customers who the other dancers thought strange", writes again the photographer.

No contract, no pussy!

Curated by Salomé Burstein

assisted by Alexis De Bonis