PHOTOGRAPHER RACHEL LENA ESTERLINE ON HUMANIZING SEX WORK

Photographer Rachel Lena Esterline began capturing women in San Francisco strip clubs in 2014. After her camera and images were confiscated by the patriarchy who owned the club she began shooting in her own apartment. Over the years she has photographed thousands of women and transgender sex workers on such an intimate scale that she provokes the viewer to confront their perception of sex work. For Esterline this also meant confronting her own perceptions, sense of self and body image hardwired from a Christian upbringing that cast sex work in shame. “When I got my bearings and started connecting with the femmes I worked with, I developed a whole new gaze removed from the one I inherited, and those interactions impacted what I had internalized my entire life.” 

Her work demands a new narrative of sex workers from the radical position of power and respect. Esterline’s aesthetic brings you into the room, the banter, the sisterhood, brought about by years of cultivating shared vulnerability, doing home shoots, building trust and providing a platform of dignity and celebration. “Looking back it was also an important mirror for the proximity of femmes and home space, sex and bedrooms, rent and intimacy, etc.  It created a powerful human atmosphere for these goddesses in our society who are very often minimized internally and externally.” Recalls Esterline. The work does not shy away from the struggle that is inevitably associated with the path, instead Esterline chooses to humanize the marginalized, provoking understanding and empathy. Her visual storytelling ultimately seeks to demystify sex work, opening a path to address the real abusive aspects of the world in which these women hustle for their livelihood.

Rachel Lena Esterline shares a visual story of sisterhood and women who work as sex workers. “It’s not about reaching an end goal, as much as making something become more real. I feel lucky and honored to coexist with that process. These images trace some of the humans, experiences and spaces I just described.”