I found this woman recently through Flickr. She’s a professional photographer who’s travelled all over the world, and the thing most likely to catch a hetero male (or bi female) eye about her work are lots of shots of sex workers. Lately she posts these along with headlines taken from current events, often with ironicly comedic results, and posts the entire article under the pic. But there are lots of other shots of all types of people from all over the world. From her own statements found on various sites:

A sex worker is a truth worker, if only Washington had the values of most hookers

I am promoting lookism, extending the power of wonderful sexual images and other photographs from around the world that I have shot-

I photograph the sex workers, prisioners, poverty, war and difficult marginal sitautions.
I will now merge these forgotten people with the headlines of the news, usually only shown with pictures of the powerful, or blonde news presenters!!!

The world is a chaotic flux of images upon which we impose a meaning. My photography aims to crush through the imposed meanings to get to the image itself.

From the image I find an infinate number of unconventional meanings-this is particularly why I like strippers and drag queens because I try and remove them from a sexual context and place them in a freespace where all kinds of meanings can arise for the viewers.

I studied photojournalism at The School of The Art Instiute of Chicago and than received a Masters there as well. I was a stringer for AP when I was twenty-four years old. I worked for the mayors office in Chicago and a press photographer for the Immigration Office in Chicago, and Telemundo channel 44 and for the Hilary Rodham Clinton foundation for children. I also won the Patagonia travel award but I didn’t go at the time. I have received several grants but they were never large enough to pay for my photography. I was invited to join Gamma and I received a post in South Asia. I could not take it as we had spent all of our money coming to live in Europe. I continued to shoot everything even though I was not linked to an agency and than Corbis/Sygma picked me up and I ended up leaving.

I love my early photos from my days in Central America in 1982 when I went and photographed prisons in Guatemala. I have travelled around the world capturing everything from sex workers to Russian prisons and riots in Serbia.

(I did a little typo editing in the text, might have missed some-ed.)

Here’s a link to a few photo-essays. Note: click where it says ‘photos’ to begin the text for the various countries represented.

Here are the links to her Flickr (warning:lots of boobs) and MySpace pages. Apparently she has a podcast as well, but I haven’t gotten that far yet…

Also thanx to the Doc for turning me on to Gail’s work!