Counting My Stars Now

Gayle Ferraro smuggled cameras into Myanmar (formerly Burma) to produce this amazing documentary, about the Southeast Asian sex trade. Her subjects are young prostitutes–the primary character is 17–and most of them have been sold or tricked into the business, some at ages as young as eight. Their only alternative yields devastating poverty (wages sewing in factories: $1 USD/day).
A couple months ago, I had the opportunity to see Sex in Asia, Reagan Louie’s photographic essay about the Asian sex trade at SF MOMA, and had mixed feelings about them, in their glossy splendor–were they perversions, exploitation, art, indictments? His captions, with quotes, gave his subjects a voice, but their photos were blank, guarded, suggestive. A document such as Ferraro’s makes it abundantly clear how little Louie’s photographs let his women tell their stories. It’s not necessarily fair to compare them outright, because they’re two extremes–Louie’s photographs are large and beautiful, and express more about the artist than the subject, while Ferraro’s film is bleak and narrated almost exclusively from the mouths of the women who live that life–but it made the grey area between them glow like a nuclear reactor.
[FYI: I am not across-the-board against prostitution–I actually think it should be preserved, regulated, and unionized.]
Ultimately, I think the fantasies Louie’s exploring, with his larger-than-life, objectifying glamour shots of Asian prostitutes, are certainly interesting, and undoubtedly worth questioning, i.e. how Western portrayal (through media, entertainment) of the Asian sex worker is glamorizing and how he, as a Chinese man raised with Western values, is both complicit and a tool of the process. But to me, before this sort of inquiry can hold much weight, we need more journalistic exploration into the lives the women who live this life–true ones, with guards down, which probably can’t happen that well from an American who’s paying.