"Are you really a producer?": how do they lure girls to shoot naked

"I've been an activist and supporter of feminism since I was a teenager," recalls Brooklyn photographer Chris Verene, talking about his own monograph Camera Club, released in the 1990s. In it, he documented meetings of men who incline women to pose nude in front of a camera. Posing as photographers known in design and modeling circles, these men are often just amateur artists and use the resulting images at their discretion. They can't offer anything to the girls who are being cheated, in terms of pay or career prospects.

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Source: Feature Shoot

Verene explains that photo clubs have existed since the 1940s or 1950s. Some of the women who posed in them, such as Bunny Iger and her muse Betty Page, influenced the female image. The author of the photo project claims that it was mostly men who ruled the ball at such events. They advertised these meetings in special sections of newspapers, and hopeful young girls came. It was not difficult for Verena to get into this environment, since he is a man. He just pretended to be an amateur photographer.

After the first trip to such a photo club, Verene realized that the participants were so preoccupied with their business that they did not pay attention to him at all, even when he was standing right behind them, taking his own pictures. Enlisting the support of a friend who played the role of a model who wanted to get on a magazine spread, the photographer was able to see the situation from both sides. Where men promised paid performances and the fulfillment of dreams, women were forced to show more naked bodies, take off more and more clothes. Verena eavesdropped on promises of fame and success, and his accomplice was not paid anything and was not provided with any definite prospects in the modeling business.

Verene took care to preserve the anonymity of both the men who got into his pictures and the women on whom their lenses were aimed. He points out that the resulting photos are not to shame these amateur photographers, and not to avenge their models. On the contrary, he seeks to show an imbalance of forces in the process of creating a photograph, as well as in the process of turning sex into a commodity.