So Hot - Mary's Strip Club
Photographer: Cammie Toloui
Exhibit Title: So Hot - Mary's Strip Club
Location: United States
I am a photographer whose core interest is the intersection of sex and the patriarchy, with a particular focus on the male gaze.
As a young photographer, I worked as a stripper in a peep show where I turned my camera toward my customers: I watched men who watched me as I stripped.
Thirty-plus years later, I was given full access to document life inside of Mary’s, a strip club in Portland, Oregon. I wanted to continue exploring the male gaze from a unique perspective, and I needed to figure out how to handle issues of consent in a dark, crowded strip club. After some research I decided to photograph using a thermal imaging camera, normally used to detect the heat signatures of buildings and machinery.
I found this exploration to be surprising and profound. By revealing only the heat generated by and between humans, the images go deeper than any surface markers of identity like makeup, tattoos or skin color. What they reveal is the essence of existence and human connection, and offer a unique perspective on the sexual and social interactions in a strip club.
My Book, 5 Dollars for 3 Minutes was published by Void in 2021. It was shortlisted in the 2022 Rencontres d'Arles Book Award and in 2024, I was delighted to win the Fotobus Library Award for Best Photobook of the Year.
“The project was photographed in the early 90s when Cammie Toloui was working as a stripper at the Lusty Lady Theater in San Francisco to fund her photojournalism degree at San Francisco State University.
Customers who paid to view her naked body and watch her perform sex acts on herself were offered a discounted price if they consented to being photographed. The resulting series of black and white photographs, baroque-like in their dramatic lighting, are free of any prejudice. Instead, they are compellingly imbued with a deep sense of curiosity and understanding, with each photograph revealing a broad spectrum of sexuality, fetishes, and often-private aspects of masculinity.
Today, the series retains a deeply powerful urgency and importance because of how Cammie Toloui took control of and inverted the male gaze, turning it back on itself, at a time where the male gaze was an overarching dominant force within daily life, both culturally and socially.
Void is proud to publish this extraordinary body of work for the first time. Photographs from the series have been included in exhibitions at the Tate Modern in London, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, and Camerawork Gallery in San Francisco, among others.”
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