LAPDANCER

During much of the 1990s, there was a hidden voyeur in the strip clubs of the East Coast tristate area: a stripper with a camera. A graduate of NYU's Tisch School of the Arts and an assistant to Annie Leibovitz, Beasley danced and stripped for $20 a lap. While trying to save up money, and avoid exhaustion and arrest, she turned her camera on fellow dancers and the customers who paid for them. More than 150 of her full-color photographs are gathered here, none altered, capturing everything from hilariously subdued patrons to wryly mocking workers in various states of undress. Over nine years, Beasley's camera acquired a kind of nonchalance that avoids oversensationalizing the clubs. Men stare at dancers like deer in the headlights; dancers take smoke breaks while clad raffishly in (recently acquired?) men's underwear. Every sort of awkward, lurid position people get into in strip clubs is unblinkingly revealed in a brash layout of full-page photos, while occasional and commentary by dancers, patrons or Beasley herself are moving and honest. Beasley notes that many patrons were "pleased with the role reversal, with being objectified"—the kind of paradox that makes this book a luridly shrewd pleasure. (June)