Jason Langer

In 2012, while walking through Forest Park in Portland, Oregon, I stumbled upon a free performance by the Wanderlust Circus. I asked the performers if I could make their portraits, and they all agreed. From there, I discovered an interconnected network of exuberant body-based performance artists—exotic dancers, circus artists, burlesquers, neo-vaudevillians and drag queens – using the body itself as a form of personal and political expression. Over the next five years, I made 100 portraits and asked each performer two key questions: What brought you to the stage? And what is the difference between your stage persona and your everyday personality? As a practicing Buddhist of 30 years I was particularly interested in the illusory quality and plasticity of their alter egos.

At the time, I was raising two young children. After daily school drop-offs and pickups, doctor’s appointments, sports practices, cleaning, and cooking, I would put them to bed, pour a shot of whiskey, and head out to photograph Portland’s eccentric performance subculture —on stage, in exotic dance clubs green rooms, and in bedrooms, garages, and basements. I began to think of myself as following in the footsteps of photographers who had chronicled the sex trade in earlier generations: E. J. Bellocq, who made portraits in the brothels of New Orleans’ Storyville district, and Susan Meiselas, whose early-1970s photographs of carnival strippers incorporated backstage moments, notes, and ephemera from the performers themselves. Over the next few years, I began carving my own path—shaped by Pacific Northwest rain, boots and coffee. 

I eventually called this project Subrosa and the Cult of Aphrodite. “Subrosa” refers to Portland—the City of Roses—and the secret life beneath its surface. “The Cult of Aphrodite” evokes both the ancient Corinthian rites devoted to the goddess of beauty and love and the contemporary stage of the strip club, where femininity is performed nightly through desire, seduction, autonomy, and raw strength—fueled by lust, spectacle, and commerce. In Portland, the exotic dance community is largely matriarchal—held together, directed, and sustained by women.

Portland is the perfect place for such an investigation. With its reputation for youth and eccentricity, the city has the highest number of strip clubs per capita in the United States, due in part to the 1987 State v. Henry decision, which established full nudity as protected free speech under the Oregon Constitution.

In Subrosa, the interviews are as intimate and as the photographs, both offering testimony. The performers speak of personal freedom and expression, picking oneself off the streets, rebuilding self-confidence after abusive marriages, defiance against racism and misogyny, affirmations of sexual and trans identity, body positivity, independence, humor, exhibitionism, and unapologetic erotic expression.

At first, I thought the performers were very different from me. In my 20s and 30s I was not taking off my clothes on stage in front of hundreds of people each night to feed my family. But after a few years of making these pictures, I discovered that we shared a common goal: to find balance between creative expression, which asks for spontaneity, risk-taking and openness to the muses—and raising a family, requiring constancy and predictability.

The prints for Subrosa and The Cult of Aphrodite are toned in Stumptown coffee, creating a mocha-colored patina that subtly evokes the hushed tones of vintage Pacific Northwest. The acid is reversed in sodium bicarbonate or Alka Seltzer.

Subrosa is a portrait of the vibrant, diverse, rebellious, and bawdy underground of pre-pandemic Portland, before many of these clubs and venues shuttered. Most importantly, it is a meditation on survival and balance: between creative impulse and domestic stability, and between vulnerability and sheer tenacity. All the stories are about transformation in some way, encouraging us to redefine our own ideas of self and virtue.

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Jason Langer