From the Slate:
Inside the American Brothel
If Zagat did a guide to brothels, they might want to consider a consultation with photographer Marc McAndrews. After all, McAndrews spent five years photographing 33 of Nevada’s (legal) brothels for Nevada Rose: Inside the American Brothel (Umbrage Editions).
The spark for the project came to McAndrews in 2004 while he was working in Nevada. He was asked if he’d ever visited a brothel (he hadn’t), but he was intrigued and showed up unannounced at various brothels in hopes of gaining permission to photograph them.
“My initial motivation was curiosity,” McAndrews communicated via email about the project. “A beautiful thing about photography is the access it can afford you. It’s a reason to get into something, to get past the barriers that people put up.”
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“After I went out to the brothels for the first time I had such a positive response to the work back in New York that I decided to keep going back,” McAndrews said.
“At many of the houses, the women would approach me to be photographed before I even asked them. This occasionally led to misunderstandings while photographing them because many initially thought I was doing nude and sexier photographs for the websites. The regular employees were pretty open and accepting of being photographed. The customers were difficult because I’d usually only be able to approach regulars or men that the women knew well, so the pool of potential subjects was greatly reduced.”
Not until McAndrews had been working on the project for five years did he finally get permission to meet the owner of the Bunny Ranch, Dennis Hof.
The long-sought-after meeting took place in Hof’s office, which doubled as his bedroom. McAndrews arrived just in time to be in the room for a conference call Hof was on with Heidi Fleiss, Larry Flynt, and Ron Jeremy. McAndrews says, “Dennis gets off the phone, turns to me, and says ‘alright I don’t know why you’re here, I don’t want to work with you, but you have 5 minutes, tell me what ya got to say.’ I … have no idea what I said to him, but when I had exhausted every possible angle … he looks at me after an awkwardly long pause and says, ‘Alright, when do you want to take these pictures?’ ”
With all the preconceived ideas of brothels and the cast of characters who both work and frequent them, McAndrews felt he had to give a fair portrayal of them. “Everybody knows what goes on in the brothels.” McAndrews explains. “I approached the brothels the same way I would any other project or assignment, and when I photographed the women (or owners or customers, for that matter), I didn’t want to demonize them for what they did, but I was also careful not to glorify them. I think the fact that I became and remain friends with many of the women that work or have worked in the houses speaks to the honesty of the project.”
See the rest of the photos here.