girls girls girls

The Little Chapel of Esoteric Cosmetology

I attribute my love of photography to just one image, a poster that I associate with every job I had growing up, whether it was at a truck stop or an office: a kitten dangling from a tree, and what is that look on its face? Fear? Anger? Torture? Or is that kitten at a loss, as I was, as to why so many people identified with a scared kitten hanging from a tree branch with a slogan beneath: Hang In There. I realized much later that nobody really wanted to inconvenience that kitten, that no kittens had in fact been harmed in this photographer's desire to describe the nature of life. We're all that kitty; these models are that kitty.

For the last three years I have bartended at a country western bar in downtown Las Vegas befriending the hustlers, the addicts, and occasionally the hooker with a heart of gold. I began photographing them by renting a room at a local motel, redecorating the whole place as a tiny fashion/glamour shoot, then finding and occasionally paying the women for their time. Guy friends hang outside to watch pimps and "boyfriends" while we work inside to make over our models, cleaning faces and doing makeup, teasing, curling, straightening hair or fitting wigs.

Each shoot costs approximately six shifts worth of tips and hourly wage from the Bunkhouse Saloon, a week of organizing, cleaning, washing, and boxing the sets, costumes, makeup, etc for the shoot, at least five people willing to forego a night of partying to hang out at a shady motel which never gets quite to temperature from the box a/c hanging out the window. At least one of the five is a hair and/or makeup professional as I have no patience or talent for that sort of work, preferring to spend all my time photographing and talking with the women.

It plays out as a camp-like atmosphere, discussing boys and gossiping about other women. The men I would describe as pimps are always respectfully referred to as boyfriends; the women delight in wearing the wedding dress I always bring to shoots from my own failed attempt at love and forever. They watch themselves in the mirror and I thrill at seeing myself, if a less jaded version, in this daydream of life. They almost always fling the door open wide, look out at stunned boyfriends, and we are all disappointed at the response of a man wearing a deer in the headlights face.

Down the streets most stripped of the bling and glamour of Vegas' image and certainly its image culture, we do as the tourists do: we pretend; we play dress up; we have a fantasy of ourselves for a few moments or a few hours, then return to our dread real lives.

Whereas the tourist experience is mediated by social contracts, obligation and fear, our delusions of grandeur are boundless. Groups of people who would normally not come together in this familiar way find ourselves together, having intimate conversation under the guise of the camera's desire. I'll never know what photography means to the project, how much of it is actually performance art, but that the camera provides its possibility. It functions as an excuse to hang out, to smile, to pretend. Someone told me once that photography is "dead." Ah, shit, I thought, have we really had the last of the good times?

But I realized then what the kitten photographer had already known: everybody's just trying to crap on your parade. You study photography? That's over. You're going into dentistry? Look out, the robots going to replace you, then what will you do with all those big student loans? Hang in there, help's on the way. Look at the photos and play along. It's meant to be funny, ridiculous, beautiful and heartbreaking, and we're all in on the joke; no humans were betrayed in the making of this album.

Note the abrasions of desire and telltale signs of self-mutilation. Watch, if you will, the nature of self-loathing that sets one to seek out merciless chemicals that ravage a body and destroy the teeth, turning them to powder so that they simply begin to vanish. After the first act the body starts the process of vanishing as well, flesh loose with the lessening of fat and muscle to protect brittle bones.

Finally take comfort in the knowledge that we're all so very much alike: we wish to be seen, cherished, to be loved for our selves, because of and not in spite of our extraordinary flaws.

xoxo, Jonnie

p.s. Esoteric cosmetology comes from 'esoteric cosmology,' which has to do with planes of existence, techniques of self transformation, higher worlds, altered states of consciousness, and generally addresses the origin, purpose and destiny of the universe and of consciousness and the nature of existence. So that's like... what we're doing, but we're doing it with physics and wigs, making discoveries while learning the tricks of the trade. Go ahead! Go ahead and say it, because we're all aware that that is SO over.