Photographer Jason Langer turns his lens toward Portland, Oregon's (The Rose City) exuberant and eccentric world of night performance. Over the course of five years, he documented and interviewed more than one hundred performers whose acts blur the boundaries between disguise and revelation, using their bodies as vehicles for both erotic and political expression. His intimate colour photographs, captured backstage in strip clubs and in the performers' homes, offer a rare glimpse behind the spectacle. Following in the tradition of EJ Bellocq, who made photographs in the brothels of New Orleans' Storyville district in the 1910s, and Susan Meiselas, who documented carnival strippers in the 1970s, Langer worked within the context of Portland's reputation as having the most strip clubs per capita in the United States and Oregon s landmark 1987 Supreme Court case, State v. Henry, which essentially declared nudity an act of free speech. In Subrosa-Latin for Åunder the rose,Ä a phrase associated with secrecy and what is spoken in confidence the title also evokes Portland, the 'City of Roses,' where these photographs and interviews took place, and the subculture beneath its beds of roses. Langer is drawn to those who express identity and defiance through movement, costume, and ritual, where drag queens, burlesque dancers, clowns, aerialists, and vaudevillians transform personal histories of pain, liberation, and resilience into art. The work is part collaboration, part confession. Langer's coffee-toned portraits and bourbon-infused, interviews are deeply intimate, empathetic and remain wholly his own. In photographing these Åcreatures of the night,Ä he confronts questions of vulnerability, gender, beauty, and power, revealing a subculture that thrives in secrecy yet longs to be seen. Subrosa and the Cult of Aphrodite is both a document and a mirror-an ode to those who, while still managing to pay the rent, dare to live, love, and perform provocatively Åunder the rose.Ä
