Significant Others: Chris Buck and the Strippers' Partners of Gentlemen's Club
A photographer's portraits of the husbands, wives, girlfriends and boyfriends of exotic dancers tells stories you didn't expect to hear
Photographer Chris Buck brought out his latest book, Gentlemen’s Club, last year, in the waning days of pandemic lockdowns. A collection of portraits and interviews with the partners of strippers, it entered the world with an article in the New York Times, and a review by Dan Piepenbring of the New Yorker that described it as “Tinted with jealousy, empathy, humor, and occasional heartbreak, their stories bring depth and warmth to a misunderstood profession.”
Chris is an old friend, and we have a ritual where I try to interview him at milestones in his career – like his move from Toronto to New York in 1990, or the publication of a book, like his career retrospective Uneasy. We met at my house when he was visiting Toronto from his home in Montclair, New Jersey, and did a photo shoot and interview during one long afternoon, touching on the challenges of a very niche set of portraits, and a few shared obsessions.
(If you want to read more about my shoot with Chris for this interview, click here.)
Rick: You started the book eight, nine years ago. A lot has happened since then, how did you steer the project to deal with that?
Chris: So what do you mean by things that have happened?
Rick: #MeToo was a big thing that happened. The pandemic obviously happened when the book was about to come out. Things that will affect how people react to it that you might not thought of eight years ago.
Chris: One of the things is that it was never advocacy - it was never an activist book. It was more like "I'm curious, I want to go where my curiosity takes me." People talk about CRT (Critical Race Theory) and Woke culture these days, but at the time it was all about “intersectional”, that was the buzz word at the time. And this book started off as being basically a bunch of white dudes with tattoos. And that's kind of what I expected at least.
Rick: Which is what I thought you were going to do, and I was actually pleasantly surprised when I discovered that you weren't. But everybody has the experience of working with an arts organization and you have an idea and you're pitching it, and then they stop you and say "That's great, but we just want to get some more women and people of colour involved." I might be making fun of that a bit but it's true.
Chris: Yes! The fact that when I was starting it...I started this in 2014. Trump was elected in 2016, he wasn't a thing as a viable candidate until 2015. Now the reason I mention that is I felt like I'm going to be over in this area - and it was exciting - where nobody else was interested. Which was about the shifting dynamic of young men, especially young white men, and what's going on in the culture for them. They're less relevant than ever, and they're in this space where their partner is a dancer and they're getting nude or grinding on customers while they're sitting at home, that's a pretty weird position to be in at a time when the culture's less about young white men than ever.
And there's a reason why depression and suicide for that category is high, though statistically they do better than a lot of groups, but their prospects for the future were at least talked about as being less than it would have been in the past. And it's more about optimism and hope than about your current viability. I thought that was really interesting,
And another thing was male sexuality - over the decades in many good ways men have become more comfortable with being less macho or masculine or whatever.
There's some detrimental sides to it as well that I hope the book would deal with, because something I didn't talk about but a friend of mine who actually married a stripper, he said to me "well, what about being a 'cuck'?" And for a moment I thought, "should I change the name of the book to Cuckold?" Maybe that would lead the audience in the wrong direction, and Gentlemen's Club was a fun name. Maybe I should call it Gentlemen's Club? Are they gentlemen?
That's the thing - I tried not to be judgmental. And the fact is that I do have standards and I do have expectations of people, and not everyone I met with the book was I impressed by. But I tried to put aside judgment and hear their story.
Rick: I know that getting subjects wasn't easy. You really struggled with that. I'd assume that put a bit more on their end of the power dynamic between subject and photographer.
Chris: How do you see the power dynamic playing out?
Rick: There's always a power dynamic between sitter and photographer. With a celebrity it tends to be very loaded on their end. But when you're shooting a civilian - for a job - they tend to be, I'm not going to say in a very submissive position, but they don't hold the same amount of power.
Chris: With a celebrity, it's an honour for you to photograph them, and for a regular person it's an honour for them to be photographed by you.
Rick: Yes. This is different because the circumstances are different.
Chris: Because it's all on the front end for them. Like a celebrity once they're there they're mine. Yes I did a lot of song and dance to get people to the table. One of the things I did early on was I'd talk with them or do a pre-scout. I stopped doing that, because people would ghost me. I learned pretty early - I need a time and an address and then I'd stop talking to them and just show up.
Because I'm used to doing a lot of research with locations and finding out about people, and so I just stopped doing that. Because often times there'd be a phone call from the dancers, sometimes the partners, but mostly the dancers because they're the gatekeepers. Which makes sense because they have something to lose, and they were the public face, and they would ask me - “Why would you do this?” You've shot a lot of famous people, so why do you want to shoot un-famous people in this loaded, stigmatized space?
One, why would you want to lower yourself to photograph regular people? What's your game here? And two - what do I have to worry about? They never put it that way but that's what I assumed.
I would tell them is that I was a customer, and I'd tell them about the idea of strength and vulnerability within the same person: You couldn't date a dancer unless you had a core strength, but by the very nature of their work they're vulnerable.
The idea of one person containing that seemingly paradoxical thing I found fascinating. And even as a celebrity photographer, my celebrity portraits, that's the spot I'm going for - you're super famous and well achieved, now let's get you really vulnerable.
And rather than doing that with highly achieved, clearly strong people, let's go to people who that's built into their narrative. And if you look at how I portray people, you'll look at some pictures and say "Well, that picture is exactly what Chris is describing." But a lot of them are like one or the other. Someone looks interesting and complex and another one they look really broken and vulnerable.
And the idea of doing a whole book on this, when I first thought of it I didn't know why I was interested. These ideas came as I was developing it, and partially because I was forced to explain to the dancers. The thing about being a customer was important, and it was just instinctual to say that. What I realized later was that by telling them that I'm explaining that I'm not an outsider. Now I am in some sense because I don't work in the business, but I'm putting myself in the ecosystem of the club.
It says: "I'm not saying I'm above you." They look at my website and they see I photograph presidents and all this, and they think "this guy's just going to come in here and make me look like a fool because he's all fancy and he thinks we're trash." And that's not true, and I wanted them to know that I was spending time in strip clubs and I found them fascinating and wanted to do a project about them. And as I say in my preface, customers are not well regarded. So for me to say to a dancer "I came into this as a customer" she's thinking this guy who's a famous photographer is showing a real vulnerability.
And part of my little speech is look you're welcome to be there for the photos or the interview, neither or both, but I have to make it clear to you that the focus is on the partner and I'm happy to have you there and include you but I'll maybe to two setups with you and your partner and maybe three setups of them alone. The focus really is on the partner here. By saying "look, I want to be respectful to you, but you won't be the centre of attention now."
It was something that some of them were put off by, but it actually showed that I was serious. This is a real thing. This isn't prurient, this is a serious project.
Rick: There's an awful lot of nudity in the book. That's not a surprise with you.
Chris: Sure.
Rick: I know you push almost any subject you have to be nude.
Chris: I can. If I see an opening.
Rick: How do you persuade so many civilians to take off their clothes for you? Keeping in mind that these aren't just any civilians.
Chris: Look, okay...
Rick: There are several dudes with their junk out in the book.
Chris: Okay. There's only one guy where you can see his genitalia. And it's not that big. That's one shot that I wish was bigger. Did you notice there's a cat in that picture? The cat's brushing against his leg.
Rick: (laughs)
Chris: If you want a large print of that for your home, let me know.
Rick: It's okay, thanks (laughs)
Chris: What's funny is that when we were looking to move, we were in Westchester, north of New York, I told the realtor about the project, because I told EVERYone....
Rick: (laughs)
Chris: I told her about the project, and she asked, “Are you doing it where the partners strip? Not bad. Not bad. Is that not the one you're doing?” I said no, but I'm doing it now. I'm of two minds with it. It's a book about strippers. To not have a few of them topless or whatever would be disingenuous. And frankly kind of disrespectful. This is what they do and this is their profession, this is a book about stripper's lives. To not have a bit of T&A in there would be prudish.
Doing the men is like the instinct you mentioned earlier - getting anyone nude is kind of a plus. I was interested in the vulnerability, and for me men nude is about vulnerability because I'm straight it doesn't read as homoerotic. It reads as vulnerable. It was kind of a feminist thing - not that I'd call myself a feminist, but I viewed it through the feminist lens that if their girlfriend's out there shaking her butt four nights a week at the club, let's see if we can get these guys to get close.
Rick: See if you like it, buddy!
Chris: See what it feels like. (laughs) There's only one guy with full nudity, and there's a bunch of guys with their shirts off, and then there's one who's fully nude but his back is turned. We did full frontal as well, but it was more interesting with his back turned. He was interesting because we talked about it as well in the interview - Petr. In Portland. Petr in Portland.
Rick: (laughs)
Chris: Petr in Portland picked a pickle.
Rick: So you took a picture of Petr's pecker in Portland. Sorry, I couldn't help that.
Chris: That's much better. You improved on it.
Rick: (laughs)
Chris: He had met his wife doing erotica photography with her. He's a photographer. And I wanted to get him nude because of that, and then during the interview I asked him "How was it?" And he was like, it was fine - I ask them to do it, so I have to be prepared to meet them in the same place. And I'm of a similar mind - oftentimes I'll throw myself in the dirt I expect my subjects to lie in for the photo.
Rick: Next question - you became more of a writer with this book. I don't know if that was your plan going in but there's a lot of writing in this book, and like I said when I got it, I love it.
Chris: It's mostly interviews. It's not like I'm writing.
Rick: Oh, but you are. You're talking to people. You're recording them. You're making decisions about what to include and not to include. That's writing.
Chris: It's more like editing –
Rick: It's a photo book with a fuck load of words in it –
Chris: It's not really a photo book. It's a book about stripper's partners. Initially the plan was to do about a hundred of them and do a single portrait and then a bio and a pull quote across from each. And then the first one I did here in Toronto I - thank God - I interviewed him. So the interview was amazing - the guy's wife was away for education and he missed her, and he talked a long, long time. In fact I didn't even record the whole thing. We talked about the club and club life and stuff, because he worked at the club, for a long time before we even started recording.
It was all so good, and then for the first year - from the time I did the first session until 365 days passed, I maybe added two more. I mean it was glacial movement. It was scary. Between the fact that the interviews were really interesting and I was never going to get to a hundred people, and so I needed to fill this bitch out. One thing that was good was with my training as a professional I always do more than one setup. I'm always doing two to four setups every time I do a shoot. So even when I did the early shoots, I had multiple setups and I had full interviews. And so I was able to cull the material I needed.
Some of them weren't as good so I cut them down, but as I got better interviews I cut the other ones down. We made multiple passes trying to trim them down and it still feels long, but I think if you're enjoying it and you're really into it, some of the interviews are going to seem long and some are going to be like you want to hear more.
You know how it is in this world - you write a lot, emails and pitches, so the writing wasn't much of a stretch. I've always enjoyed writing in my work. I wrote over a hundred stories for Uneasy, and even promotional pieces I've done have had writing in them...I've always thought it was fun to do that and here it just expanded out. I worked so hard on the interviews, the writing, that for me it feels like an interview book that we happened to drag a good photographer along.
That's how it feels to me. And the fact that both work elevates it. Because most books like this have three or four good pictures in them and the rest are OK. Whereas this has 90 pictures in it, and fully 50 of them are fully good to great.
Rick: Yeah, I loved the photos, but I really loved the reading.
Chris: Thanks. The fact that you know me I think adds something to it because you hear me talking to people, you know my backstory, when I'm talking about something and I'm clueing in that I know the dynamics of a strip club, I'm revealing something about myself that I don't necessarily mention in passing to people. I think also to that a lot of the jokes in the interviews, a lot of the throwaway one liners - most of which are cut out - but the best are kept in, and the people who know me find those ones funny because they can hear me saying them.
Like the one near the back - I don't know if you've got to this one - where there's a kid who had the dreads and he was a musician and he got these weird tattoos, and one of them was this line that cut the line of a frontal lobotomy, and I asked him “Why did you get that?” And he said, “Well, because of Trump.” And I said “I don't understand.” So he explains, well, you know, makin' a statement and all that. And my response was like, “Have you found that the tattoo has affected the administration much?”
Rick: Now, how much of a responsibility did you feel toward your subjects, and if you did, do you still feel any responsibility?
Chris: I'm still in touch with a lot of them because I did the book and I was promoting it and I needed some quotes - a few of them spoke to the New York Times and such. So that's one reason. Also I hoped some of them would buy it, which is such a sad, sad statement on my financials.
But in terms of responsibility, I'm friends with a few of them - tangentially friends - we stay in touch on Facebook, and I don't really go out with them or stuff, the pandemic obviously shut down a lot of that travel and stuff, but if I was in some of their towns I'd probably look them up and meet up for a drink or something. I feel a responsibility to make sure their voice is accurate in the writing and in how they're portrayed, so in a way all my real people pictures are more gentle than my celebrity ones, where I tend to be more ruthless.
I flipped through the book when you stepped out, and they're still pretty soulful and interesting and they're a little more documentary than - I mean I think they're good, and I've been working on this thing of shooting real people for twenty years, since I got that first Hewlett-Packard project in 1999, I've been trying to get better at shooting real people in a way that felt authentic but was also interesting just inherently and didn't need to have the celebrity connection.
And I felt that path has been difficult and the Chris Bucks project was a big part of that - a lot of the early ones aren't very good, but they got better. It was about trying to craft a narrative around people who weren't famous and create an image of them that would be interesting without a long caption or whatever.
In a way it was good but Gentlemen's Club is, a lot of the pictures are good enough, but with knowing that they're a dancer's partner, even without knowing anything else about them, makes them way more interesting. So if you know it's a book about stripper's partners you can flip through and go, wow, cool, whoa. Knowing they're a dancer's partner adds a whole level of complexity that's being cued to subtly that wasn't part of the story yet.
That's one of the reasons I was drawn to this project, it's almost as if the Chris Bucks was leading to this. Obviously one creates their own narrative. The Chris Bucks was a clever trope - people with my name, ha ha. And the pictures, some of them are interesting, some of them are less so. But with this one, there's a narrative that has more soul to it and more that is inherent to them - the stories are great, and they bring true richness and biography, but in a way it's trying to find a way to make them like a famous person while not being a famous person. In a way it's the most familiar photographer thing - find a subculture, and then make some great work of it.
Someone did a book on gypsies a few years ago; the cover was amazing, that culture and those people are fascinating, so even a medium interesting picture of those people is going to be fucking crazy, like I want to know everything. That's what I was trying to do with this - find an interesting subculture, and then make good work of it. If I say to you “Hey, I made a book of stripper's boyfriends,” you'd be like yeah, sure, but “Hey here it is” you'd be like “Oh really - so who are these people? What the hell is their story?” I think you can't help but be interested because there's a built-in conflict and a built in mystery, in that stripper's private lives are very private.
Rick: There's a big difference between shooting civilians and celebrities. Did this project each you anything going forward? Was it transformative? Did this change your working method in any way?
Chris: My quick response to that question is I can't help but think that I didn't go far enough. That I'm still hiding behind “It's a photographer going deep into the psychology and complex relationships...”. Where the real answer is that I'm a photographer who needs to make promotional projects and books and I'm also doing a subject that is of interest to me so let's do something around a topic that's interesting like strip clubs.
So I was trying to do a project that I would find interesting while I was making it and I would actually finish it. In a weird way doing the project scratched the itch, because there was little of a sexual aspect to it; there's nothing less sexy than hanging out with a stripper's boyfriend. (laughs) But it did scratch the itch because it shows that my interest wasn't just sexual, but it was something about that gray area and seedy underworld aspect and all of that. I was getting plenty of that by just hearing their stories and having genuine interactions with people and their lives.
But it does make me wonder, this was interesting, but I still feel like I need to go more personal. Like this is me still dodging the bullet. The thing is I'm doing this project now on the children of Montclair –
Rick: That's my next question –
Chris: So I'm trying to go deeper into my own struggles with my youth, to actually do that with these children is my aim.
Rick: But - they're children. It's tough to shoot kids.
Chris: Here's the thing - I started the project a few years ago. In 2018 I shot three of them. I shot one girl and two boys - I don't know if you looked at the blog post, I posted a few of them. So two of them I shot previously. And then like with the Chris Bucks I stopped and said “these aren't really working, what's wrong?” And it was the same problem with the Chris Bucks, which is I'm holding myself back because how I'll be perceived. Because I want to do pictures that are about struggle and are about kids feeling visible and underappreciated.
I give a speech to the parents about I remember being a kid and I remember distinctly feeling a strong sense of myself, being a person, and not being taken seriously by most people. My parents did, as most good parents do, they treat you like individuals especially if they have multiple kids and realize “oh, they're all different.”
And if I ruin my relationship with a few of these families, who cares? I don't care. So you know the one with the girl in the pink dress that was my Instagram post? I went into that shoot thinking “I don't care if you never speak to me again.” I didn't say that to them, but in my mind I was like, “I don't care if you hate these pictures. I don't care if you think I'm a monster. I'm going do what I want, I'm going to get some great pictures that are really weird and dark and I'm going to kill it.”
I'll show you the pictures I did - I didn't put them on the website - but I showed them to the parents and they loved them. The mom works at a prominent gallery in New York, so I'm not surprised she liked them. The thing is that my last book was stripper's boyfriends. It's not like I'm hiding the ball. It's not like I'm pretending to be pure as the driven snow, and I give the speech about the struggle of youth and my connection to it.
When I talk to people about what I do, and they're like “What do you do to make people comfortable?” And I'm like, I do a lot of things but the goal isn't always comfort. My goal is when I say I want you to do X, I want you to do X, without questioning me. So if people are comfortable, I don't want them to be too comfortable to say no to what I ask.
Rick McGinnis is a Toronto-based photographer and writer.