What started out as a simple trip to a
postcard fair turned into a lifelong investigation for author Robert Flynn
Johnson. Captivated by the beauty and originality of a group of
nineteenth-century photographs of women, he had to know more.
Now, nearly a decade after his first
encounter with the images, Johnson has uncovered more than two hundred vintage
photographs of women who lived and worked at a brothel in Reading,
Pennsylvania, circa 1892. Taken by commercial photographer William Goldman, the
photographs paint a full picture of the environment that the women
inhabited—from inside the brothel, posing artistically for the camera, to their
off-duty routines, such as reading, smoking, and bathing. Never-before
published and taken two decades before the famous E. J. Bellocq photographs of
prostitutes in Storyville in New Orleans circa 1913, these beautifully produced
photographs are only now seeing the light of day.
Johnson uses these photographs to detail
their aesthetic, historical, and sociological importance in the history of
photography, examining them alongside paintings and photographs by such artists
as Degas, Picasso, Atget, and more. Accompanied by essays from Professor Ruth
Rosen and Dennita Sewell that provide an insightful historical overview of
these images in context of the period in which they were taken and a foreword from
famed burlesque dancer Dita Von Teese, this volume provides a personal visual
record of lives of these women while also offering a deeper understanding of
the Working Girls that existed more
than 120 years ago.
