Dirty Windows.
Photographs by Merry Alpern. Introduction by Richard B. Woodward.
Scalo, New York, 1995. 112 pp., 72 duotone illustrations, 9x12".
While the world’s eyes remain transfixed on the exchange on Wall Street’s trading floor, photographer Merry Alpern spent the entire freezing cold winter of 1993-1994 hidden in a friend’s loft, spying with her camera on the dingy bathroom of an after-hours sex club in the Financial District. The stunning results of her sociological espionage reveal the hidden underbelly of life on Wall Street.
The grainy black and white images seem both forensic and artistic, strangely beautiful glances of objects and body parts, as they pass for an instant into the frame of the window. The fascination comes less from their explicitness than from the secret, sleazy world they hint at: fleeting, erotic glimpses of naked flesh, a handbag, a wedding ring, the exchange of money, a condom-covered penis, lines of coke snorted off the top of a toilet.
"Recurring characters gave these pantomimes a soap-opera quality. These mini-dramas and their unvarying props-condoms, tattoos, silicons, crack-filled my head and I began to think about the windows all the time. They found their way into my dreams."
Dirty Windows includes an introduction by the artist providing a candid and personal account of the long hours of photographic surveillance and voyeuristic obsession. Alpern has collected intellectually provocative fragments of stories that will haunt you long after you’ve put the book down-simultaneously beautiful and moving, revolting, funny, and sad.
During the winter of 1993-94, photographer Merry Alpern made these photographs from the open window of a friend's apartment off Wall Street in New York. Two tiny windows stood opposite, revealing the secret world of an after-hours sex club, where stock-brokers and other well-to-do businessmen handed over hundreds of dollars and drugs to women in G-strings and black lace. A brilliant piece of surveillance, these images also express a fascination with the seamy, taboo side of life. Alpern has met with considerable criticism for her work--last summer, she, Andres Serrano, and Barbara DeGenevieve were all vilified by the National Council of the NEA. However, her work is now in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, and her print sales have soared. A powerful new work from a controversial figure.
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