Images and Photos

Often a picture is worth a thousand words. Images of the sex industry can illuminate the lives of those who work within it. However, sometimes photographic images can be used as a tool to inspire fear, encourage stigma and discrimination and shame people who sell sex. We will collect images, by our partners and by other artists and academics that we admire, to help provide alternate framings of the sex industry.

José Miguel Nieto Olivar

Ethnographic drawings: some insights on "prostitution, bodies and sexual rights" by José Miguel Nieto Olivar (below). More information on this work can be found in the Sexuality Policy Watch Newsletter.

Laura Agustín

Laura Agustín has put together an open access collection of images of the sex industry on her Facebook page. She explains on her blog Border Thinking that she is, 'interested in less obvious manifestations of commercial sex, the ones people don’t notice or get offended or excited by. Most attention goes to bright lights at night, the obviously bawdy, red-light districts and street prostitution, but most business is done discreetly and nearly invisibly'.

Our website uses photographic images throughout. People from many different walks of life are quoted and depicted. Their inclusion here does not indicate their HIV status, sexual preference or occupation, nor does it imply that they agree with the content of the website or PLRI aims.