Lost In Lust: Cherise Isis’ “American Stripper”

We'd like to say that the photos that comprise photographer Cherise Isis' recent "American Stripper" exhibition at Peer Gallery in New York City were more than just shots of hot topless dancers wrapping themselves around poles--you know, that they made some sort of Grand Statement about the way women were commodified by the voyeuristic gaze of an audience and that they offered a glimpse into the often sordid underbelly of certain kinds of sex work. But the truth is that most of these action portraits are a lot more gentle in their grainy soft-focus dreaminess (even when they show strippers lighting their boobs on fire); the occasional smile peeks out from the sea of arched backs and heavy-lidded eyes and several of the dancers don't appear to have slid to the bottom of the poles in question so much as to have floated there, lost in their own private reveries of desire and exhaustion like spent muses at the end of a long shift. Guess they really are more than just shots of hot topless dancers after all.

· Cherise Isis' "American Stripper" (on view 'til 6/14 @ Peer Gallery, NYC; see online photo exhibition here)