Operated by John-Riley Harper. Dedicated to archiving photography from Utah's underground scenes, as well as other personal projects.

12.02.2007
Trey & Joules' (sp) birthday bash (w/ strippers!)
I was (and perhaps still am) a naive simpleton, virtuously virginal: I'd never yet been to a party with strippers. This changed last weekend. I feel a little bit silly even mentioning their presence or state of dress because I actually don't really like to make a big deal about nudity. But I guess that sometimes it does elevate things to a certain level of comic hilarity, vibrant sexuality, or at least passing interest. It's sad that the word, "stripper" even has a "sleazy" connotation, but it does and that's why I find myself trying to defend my interaction with it with the staunch morality of my very being (ha). I actually felt that the taste was positive, there were no issues such as degradation or masculine dominance involved: it was joyous celebration. And anyway, the crowd was anything but lecherous, they were a creative, bubbling mass of beautiful, humanistic love.

But still it (the event) operates in the conceptual realm. The women who stripped removed themselves from personhood for a short while and they became images, objects, ideas. Their humanity was stripped away until all that remained was the stripteaser, the birthday suits for the birthday boy. I guess what it comes down to is that we humans really are not so much living beings but concepts that play out against each other. Sometimes they bump, sometimes they explode, but mostly they remind us of other images so we can know what our roles are and perhaps play within them, all the while tantalized by projections into the flowing symbology around us. What we saw and participated in was the idea of people who take off their clothes and smile and frolic while other smiling, laughing people watch while still others cringe in embarrassment as soft, naked body parts are squished into their faces. It is all a scripted play in the exchanges of attention that is our currency. We watch, we listen, we perform all at once.



It's only later that we contemplate. If you find it difficult to make sense of your senses then perhaps the images below can help put a fix on those shifting, intangible thoughts. But probably they can't. :)

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