Without Equality/Without Consent
WITHOUT EQUALITY/WITHOUT CONSENT is an unbound book composed of texts and photographic images. The pages may be unfolded, shuffled or read in any order. Images and texts play off one another or coalesce as if by serendipity, but they are all related in telling new stories that overcome the erasures and silences experienced by the women in this book.
WITHOUT EQUALITY/WITHOUT CONSENT began over a decade ago when I first saw the police booking photographs of ten young women who had been arrested for prostitution. Their arrest photographs – wrenching and ineffable – had been compiled into sequences, eight photos across, and ten down. These photographs were the starting point. The women were our inspiration.
Three of these women – Marie, Daisy, and Elizabeth – lent us their voices. Their statements became our first written texts. When paired with black and white photographs of street scenes, city locations, and suburban neighborhoods, they create an overall quality of vulnerability and human presence. Each picture captures a location in a woman’s arrest record.
In the spaces between the photographs, WITHOUT EQUALITY/WITHOUT CONSENT presents the personal statements of these three women, and commentaries by activists, advocates, and academics. Also presented are statistics and descriptive notes on the social, political, and legal dimensions of prostitution, in America and globally.
