Glamour girls of the streets

Kristen Peterson, Las Vegas Sun

Tuesday, Dec. 4, 2007 | 7:16 a.m.

The models in Jonnie Andersen's recent photographs emit joy, dignity, sensuality and strength.

One wears a billowy peach-colored dress. Others pose in a wedding gown, next to a Christmas tree or on a bed.

Though there are a few hardened faces, it takes a minute for your eyes to register the bruises on an arm or mounds of scar tissue on a wrist.

That is the ambiguous nature of "The Little Chapel of Esoteric Cosmetology," a self-published 8 1/2-by-11-inch book (www.lulu.com/jonnieandersen) of portraits of prostitutes who work Fremont Street.

The project began three years ago when Andersen set out to photograph the "believers, hustlers and scam artists" she met and befriended while working at the Bunkhouse Saloon on South 11th Street. She had just received her master's in photography from Yale and took a job at Glamour Shots, a national chain that specializes in "makeover photography," hoping it would influence her work.

In "The Little Chapel of Esoteric Cosmetology" there are no stereotypical images of empty lives or shadowy women scoring a job or walking dirty streets. Instead, the women are dressed, groomed and posed with props in photos that offer intentional hints of a motel room in the background.

The photo shoots took place in a rented room at the Traveler's Motel on 11th and Fremont streets. At first, Andersen says, the pimps (or "boyfriends") wouldn't let her near the women, fearing she'd talk them into getting out of the lifestyle or that the photos would boost their confidence.

The women, believing Andersen was a cop, weren't any easier to convince.

For some, it wasn't worth the time and money lost.

Eventually a regular Bunkhouse patron who worked 14 years at a nearby corner store helped Andersen connect with the women.

Andersen would spend four or five hours setting up the room with an assortment of props - printed sheets, books, AstroTurf, umbrellas and paper butterflies. The women would slip into different outfits and a makeup artist would do their hair and faces.

The sessions were treated like regular fashion shoots and designed, like other fantasy portraiture, for people "who just want to exit their lives for a minute, go on vacation," Andersen says.

They'd pick up their photographs at the motel or at the Bunkhouse.

"I noticed all these different women who wanted to come in and get their picture taken and get excited to see the pictures," Andersen says. "They don't get a lot of girl talk. Most of the women are sworn enemies of one another."

Originally from Nebraska, Andersen moved to Las Vegas in 1999. She was a cocktail waitress at Mandalay Bay before heading to Yale. The Glamour Shots job, she says, was a way to thumb her nose at the pretension she experienced at Yale and elsewhere in the art world. At the time, Andersen had also launched a successful line of satirical Las Vegas greeting cards.

When it came to photographing prostitutes, friends and acquaintances told Andersen she might come across as an "ivory tower Yale freak, taking advantage of people on the street."

But Andersen says you can't outhustle a hustler. If anything, she saw universal similarities between these women and everyone else.

That's partly why the models are presented as humans and not as stereotyped or glamorized drug addicts working the street.

"That's really been done a lot," Andersen says. "Anybody can do that without even knowing the women. They can stand across the street and shoot the photos."

The photos don't gloss over reality and they don't exploit misery.

Exploitation was a common occurrence in the work by Andersen's photography students who turned in images of homeless people looking sad and forlorn.

"Didn't they ever smile?" she'd ask them.

"Yeah," they'd say, "but we didn't print those."