Subrosa and the Cult of Aphrodite

In Subrosa and the Cult of Aphrodite, photographer Jason Langer turns his lens toward Portland Oregon's (The Rose City), exuberant and eccentric world of night performance, spending five years documenting and interviewing over one hundred performers whose acts blur the lines between disguise and revelation. Langer would venture into the night to make portraits of brave dancers who use their bodies for erotic and political declarations in front of hundreds of hungry eyes, capturing color photographs in the backs of strip clubs and dancers' homes. 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, 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 "creatures of the night," he confronts questions of vulnerability, gender, beauty, and power, revealing a subculture that thrives in secrecy yet longs to be seen. In his latest book, Langer reflects on the tension between individual self-expression and the pursuit of predictability and consistency in fatherhood. Subrosa 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 "under the rose."