On the 7th day the omnipotent, omnipresent one rested, but His Horned alter-ego didn’t and neither do I.

I almost did. I was seriously considering staying at home and getting an early night instead of going to The Grand Hyatt Hotel in Tokyo’s Roppongi to take photos at ‘Urban Tribes 2009’, a prestigious dance event boasting such luminaries as DJ Krush and Kenny Larkin at the request of a stripper/pole dancer friend of mine, who with some friends was performing there.

I say almost, because as I was considering not going it occurred to me that if I chose to stay at home and get some well needed sleep rather than go and hang out with 4 beautiful strippers for the night in a 5 star hotel at an event where I would never even consider paying the entrance fee that I might as well shoot myself then and there as my life was clearly over.

I unashamedly enjoy turning up at a 5 star hotel to a large event and waltzing pass the queues of overdressed, conspicuously rich people to the desk and picking up my ‘access all areas’ pass.

Yuri, my dancer friend met me at the forth floor security checkpoint and asked if I would rather hang out with her and the girls in the dressing room or wait downstairs with the afore mentioned revelers, not a difficult choice I can assure you.

Sitting in the dressing room, having been introduced to the other dancers and sipping a beer, absentmindedly watching one of them apply adhesive to her nipples to hold her nipple tassels in place, I felt perfectly at home.
I am no stranger to this and related industries.
I have since my teens always had friends who work in the sex industry in its various forms and have spent more than my fair share of time in rooms with g-stringed girls, who I have been privileged to call friends.
It really does feel like a privilege even now, these girls live on the edges of societies that generally frown on them officially, while being only too happy to turn a blind eye to the husbands, boyfriends and elected officials that are their main clients or applauding, wolf-whistling audience.
I like to think I live on those edges too, in the past I certainly did, but really these girls make me look like a bank manager with 2.5 kids, a dog and a mortgage.
And that is why I have so much respect for them, why I feel so at home in their company.
What they do takes (for want of a better word) balls that I simply do not possess. (I don’t really have the tits for it either but that’s beside the point ;-)

Whilst I love taking pictures of their shows what really interests me now as a photographer is what happens back stage, in dressing rooms with closed doors, before they get up on the stages where they turn into godesses, the subjects of a million sexual fantasies.

So here, for your delectation, are a few pictures from an ongoing series of some girls who make me feel like I’m really alive.