Since 1975 Yoshiichi Hara has made more than fifteen hundred photographs of strip-tease artists – and Stripper Zukan is regarded as the starting point of this lifelong project. In 1981 Hara held his first ‘stripper’ exhibition at the Ginza Nikon Salon Gallery in Tokyo – featuring the photographs of two hundred strippers created after visiting some three hundred Tokyo-area strip clubs. The next year he published Stripper Zukan, which comprised of only sixty-five portraits from that series, a book inspired by E.J. Bellocq’s Storyville Portraits.

One immediately sees that each of the book’s portraits is from the clubs’ ‘greenrooms’. The greenroom functions as a portal between the stripper’s often-mundane life and the bright stage-lights – a place where a woman metamorphoses into a stripper. Despite the photographer’s presence the women of Stripper Zukan appear relaxed, innocent, and defenseless – alone in their greenroom, protected from the outside world, their true selves before becoming fantasy objects.

In short, Hara understood that strippers each have individual lives behind the bright lights – and he recognized that behind their attitude and toughness, these women, who used their own bodies to earn a living, had everyday, often ordinary, lives, needs, and dreams.

Natsuko Oda