Subrosa Book and Exhibition

Subrosa and The Cult of Aphrodite is an intimate look at the minds of night performers; what brings them to the stage to expose their bodies and souls for audiences. Combining 80 color photographs, confessional interviews and essays, this book and traveling exhibition showcases and celebrates the complex reasons why exotic dancers, neo-bulesque, vaudeville and drag performers expose their bodies and declare themselves onstage. The photographs feature Portland Oregon's exuberance, DIY attitude and diversity in race, gender, body type and sexual orientation. The project brings together appreciators of photography, dance and LGBT communities. Subrosa spotlights the eccentric night performance scene, focusing on dance as a form of passionate expression, personal liberation, and social and political protest. The project also highlights the challenges of artistic personal expression while raising children. The intimate portraits were made in theaters, strip clubs, greenrooms, on stage, backstage, and private homes.

Portland, OR is known for its youth, idiosyncrasy, and rich culture of burlesque and stripping due to a 1987 Oregon Supreme Court ruling which protects nude dancing as a form of free speech. Portland's performers are full of character: beautiful, bawdy and resourceful, oftentimes outlandish and strange, with an emphasis on independence, nonconformity and a touch of melancholy.

Langer spent five years photographing and interviewing over 100 performers across disciplines of circus arts, burlesque, exotic and tribal dance, drag, clowning, acrobatics, kink and Neo-vadeville. Through Langer's Stumptown coffee-stained sepia tones and the performer's mystery and anonymity Subrosa's portraits echo EJ Bellocq's enigmatic Storyville Portraits of New Orleans' sex workers, circa 1910 as well as Susan Meiselas' "Carnival Strippers" from the early seventies.

Portland's flamboyant creatures of the night reveal their humanity and vulnerability performing through major life changes: divorce, raising children, transitioning from male to female/ female to male, an abusive marriage, surviving racist and misogynistic violence, disability, blindness, and picking oneself off the street and onto stage.

Subrosa means "in confidence, a secret" and particular to this project "under the rose," a reference to Portland, "City of Roses." Langer's collaboration with Portland's performance scene is a calling to confront conformity and embrace transformation, expression and desire.