The photographer Greg Friedler, in town to shoot subjects for his book Naked Las Vegas, looks the young woman over. “Are you over 17?” he begins. “I just want to make sure I’m not doing kiddie porn.”
Samantha Wallace looks waifish, with her dark black hair streaked purple, but her nose ring and piercing stare suggest she’s older. At least a little older. Nineteen. Which is old enough, and moments later, she steps behind a curtain into a small concrete-floored space in the back of Dust, a Downtown gallery. With a documentary filmmaker hovering around her with a video camera, Friedler compliments her on her look and takes three quick photos of her. Then Wallace takes her clothes off. Her small body is adorned with a Spider-Man tattoo on her lower back, and a tattoo arcing across the upper edge of her breast that reads “Meme Si Mon Corps”—this from an ex-boyfriend. Her belly button and one nipple are pierced, and her look is aggressively cool.
“I feel great about my body,” she says moments later. “It’s great when you’re sharing it with someone you feel intimate about.”
Naked Las Vegas will be a document of the unvarnished nakedness of Las Vegans. It will be his fourth book in the series, following projects in New York, London and Los Angeles, and his first in years. The book features side-by-side portraits of a wide variety of people: one shot they’re fully clothed; the other they are naked. He shoots all sizes, all ages, all colors. He says it could be his best book, if he can find enough people.
Las Vegas should be an easy enough place to find 150 people willing to expose their nether regions. Yet, because of scheduling challenges and a tight budget, Friedler has only a few dozen confirmed subjects. But among the artsy, indie-band types and the aging nudists who have come by, there are a few characters. The most unusual of the bunch is a man named Ted Innes, who strolls in wearing a kilt, an ear cuff—no Scottish chieftain would enter battle without one, he tells me—and a dirk sheathed to his side (along with a dinner knife and fork that both look large enough to kill a man if necessary). A skeindugh—literally a black knife—wraps around his ankle, and Innes is quick to expound on the battlefield utility of these weapons. Naked, he has a hill-shaped purple scar that rises and falls along his belly, the site of an operation to remove part of his pancreas.
“That’s way over my head, but it doesn’t sound good,” Friedler says of the operation. Innes keeps his boots on for the naked shots (skeindugh, too) and wears an expression of calm pride. Later he’ll tell me that, after a long and difficult recovery from his surgery, he finally feels human again.
Friedler, on the other hand, is feeling frantic. He wears brown corduroys cuffed at the leg, and dark Nike shoes, and looks like he could be a computer salesman. His photo shoots are remarkable for their brevity. Subjects come in, Friedler shoots them with little delay, they take off their clothes with similar efficiency, and then they’re gone. For his first book, Friedler had subjects fill out a three-page questionnaire. Photo shoots lasted half an hour. He enjoyed taking the time to learn about the men and women he photographed. Here, they are lasting five minutes.
Maybe that fits us. The stack ’em, pack ’em and rack ’em speed of the shoots feels in sync with a town where every show runs twice a night. Even a Meaningful Art Project has boiled down to a question of planning and logistics—how many naked people can you shoot in a few hours?
But then the sun sets, and First Friday takes over the streets around the gallery. Friedler sends assistants out to the festival canvassing for volunteers—and it works. By 9, Dust is packed. Suddenly the gallery has become an event. (“They’re shooting people naked in there? Really? Shit!”) Now it’s all just a party, a dare, a what the f--k? More and more people pour in, and Friedler scrambles to work through the backlog. This, too, feels like what Vegas does best—a spontaneous bit of provocation, or liberation.
I speak to Friedler a few days later by phone; he’s at a bookstore boning up on Las Vegas history, looking for a so-far elusive key to unlock the city. He sounds like he needed to spend the day at the pool. He shot more than 50 people on Friday and was pleased with the turnout. But he needs another 100, so he’ll be back shooting this weekend. (Visit nakedlasvegas.net if you’d like to volunteer.)
Friedler has long made a distinction between nudity and nakedness. The first is linked to sex and eroticism and is, for him, only a mask, a pose that manages to conceal one’s true self as readily as clothes do. Nakedness, on the other hand, is the unclothed body shorn of sex or pretense or illusion—it is a glimpse at who the person really is.
“I’m a straight guy,” he tells me. “I love photographing females. But that’s not this project. It’s about identity, rules in society, public persona versus private personality.” Photographing people naked adds a whole other dimension. “I don’t see it as a sexual thing at all.” Which is what gives such charge to his decision to shoot in Las Vegas. After all, he notes, most displays of nakedness here are “linked to some sort of erotic gratification. Almost all of it is, actually.”
*****
This is our vision of Las Vegas, of course. Sin City. Anything goes. The mecca upon which the debauched young celebrities, and the cool-as-shit lounge lizards, and the young professionals awash in cash, and the sorority girls and frat boys from Beach Bum U. all descend in their infinite horniness and give thanks for the cheap hotels, free drinks and buzzing licentiousness, while the rest of us enjoy the afterglow of the churning buzz that makes Las Vegas go.
What happens here stays here, they say. And yet, what exactly happens here? Vegas would have you believe it’s the sexiest city on Earth, but it’s sex as striptease. Ads with mostly naked dancers and various adult entertainers litter the gutters of Las Vegas Boulevard, but Friedler’s people have to pass out fliers with genitals and nipples whited out to avoid being arrested. Prostitution is legal in Nevada, but it took a court order earlier this summer to allow brothels to advertise. There’s no shortage of strip clubs in town, but none of them are on the Strip. And talk of promoting the city with more explicit advertising—why not a fully naked couple on a giant billboard over the Strip?—fills officials with a palpable unease.
Randy Snow, creative director at R&R Partners, the ad agency giant that oversees the ads for the convention bureau, tells me that over the last 15 years, there’s been hardly anything racy. Even with the What Happens Here ads—a masterpiece tag line of seductive suggestion—the ad agency rejects any script whose tag line provides sex as the only possible “outcome.”
“We don’t want to promote Vegas as just a place for that,” he says. “People find excitement here in many ways. We’re tasked with dealing with the totality of the city.”
Of course, even in the home of corporate entertainment, it makes little sense to publicly offend. And that’s one reason why Vegas nakedness is so contradictory. We are a small city, despite our international stature. We are trying to find ourselves as a community, and one of the things any community must do is define some standards on the public display of nudity. That’s why Clark County may allow a radio station ad prominently displaying a woman’s neathage. But citizen complaints resulted in an emergency airbrush-ectomy. Even Las Vegas Weekly, so known for its plethora of fleshy ads, must toe the line on its skinful covers so as not to upset too many distributors. In Vegas, you see, we want to please everybody. No one wants to promote Vegas as a sex-tourist’s dream—we’re not Bangkok, after all—but, fortunately, it’s easy to see people in various states of undress in Sin City.
I begin the next night with one of the twin icons of Vegas nudity, the showgirl, who is featured in full effect at Bally’s Jubilee. Dozens of statuesque dancers with outrageously beautiful costumes parade around a stage, belting out Gershwin and Cole Porter when they’re not retelling the Samson and Delilah myth or singing and dancing right before the Titanic goes down. It’s so old-fashioned, so sweet, so Cecil B. DeMille. The dancers’ breasts blend together in a parade of perfect roundness—taut, gravity-defying, capped with cute-as-a-button nipples and ready for immediate exhibition in a fine-art museum. The show’s partial nakedness is nonthreatening and almost purely aesthetic; its excitement is as much in the dancers’ smiles and the “naughty but nice” songs as it is in the form of the bodies on display.
Of course, at Jubilee, there is essentially no removing of clothes. If Friedler is right to make a distinction between nakedness and nudity, surely one of the lines separating the two is that nudity involves the removal of clothes, involves the revelation of skin, creates the curiosity of seeing someone becoming naked. At Jubilee, the ready-to-serve, pre-unpackaged bodies, ironically, call attention away from the breasts, in this case, or from the muscled buttocks of the small contingent of male dancers—the closest comparison. This seminudity is presented simply as is, as an essential and preexisting condition, upon which there is no further room to elaborate.
Later that night I find myself at Sin, to check out the other icon of naked Las Vegas—the stripper, the coil around which the impressions of a sexually charged city are heated. (If you believe the Showgirls mythology, the former is the back alley base upon which the penthouse of Strip nudity is built.) Yet, entertainment is king in this town—it’s all about the show. So nakedness, even here, has little to do with the excitement and danger of sex, or with the aesthetic pleasures of viewing a body, or even with an unshackling of social constraints. In other words, this is no gutbucket titty bar. It mostly feels like a means to move liquor, with its huge parking lot and comforting size—this is like a Target of a strip club. The doorman checks my ID, even shakes my hand. I mean, he does this with enthusiasm, thrusts his hand out and says, “Welcome. Have a great time.” And when it turns out that, as a local, I get in free, and after another greeter inside gives me an even heartier handshake, I think that I might.
The club is large and dark; it has enormous red-lighted signs indicating the women’s and men’s bathrooms. At another bar, a flat screen shows a postgame interview with Barry Bonds, who’s just tied Hank Aaron’s home run record. The dancers, post-performance, flit by in lingerie or next to nothing, some on their way to grind dutifully into the laps of their customers.
In Friedler’s photos, the naked body is meant to be the essence. At Jubilee, it is meant to be the ideal. At Sin, the naked body is a closer approximation of the real thing. For one, the women in the strip club are much closer to the crowd. And, at first, they appear larger than life, draped in moody purple lighting. One woman performs on an oval-shaped stage sandwiched between the bar. She looks tired. Her breasts are dense, heavy, substantial, weighed down by something. And they’re all I have to focus on, because the woman’s eyes are forgettable, her expression incomprehensible. It’s hard at first to resist the stereotypes of the stripper as damaged goods. Her movement is slow, but not slow as in seductive, languid; rather, she is sluggish.
The next woman’s energy is directed entirely inward, like her mind is racing or she is meditating, but whatever it is, everything else, her state of undress, her surroundings, are perfunctory. Her replacement drops her purse onstage (are there no lockers backstage?) and swiftly wipes down the pole. Only the fourth dancer announces herself with authority; her legs are as sleek as a greyhound’s, and she plays with her short shorts as if contemplating whether to remove them at all.
All the performance venues invite the gaze, but probably none so intensely as the strip club. At the other places, you are aware of crowds, an audience, being part of a collective. Everyone’s attention is focused. Here, your gaze is voluntary. No one goes to a strip club not to look—only here, as friends mingle and are lost in their drinks and conversation, the bodies fade into the background. It’s only the strippers who are most committed to aggressively displaying their bodies who seem to have a chance of breaking past their own objectification. Still, at least tonight, most of these strippers do not invite the gaze, because most of them do not appear to seek it, and one senses the deepest indifference about whether they are being watched or not.
In the end, of course, for a city that many feel conflates sex and nudity, there’s not much sex here. There’s a lot more here for the eye to take in than in Jubilee—the variety of form among eight or 10 dancers feels like it far exceeds the variety of nakedness at Jubilee, where dozens of dancers all anonymously blend into an image of Art Deco champagne-age, “powder my back,” bubbly frivolity. But there’s far less for the eye to take pleasure in. The women don’t look like they’re having much fun.
The few who do seem to be directing their gaze at a particular person, and so their pleasure is hard to share in. Eventually, the strippers begin to recede.
After midnight I roll into 40 Deuce, tucked into a corner of the luxurious Mandalay Place. The sexy, stylish ads outside the burlesque club promise the most enjoyable moment of the night, a “third way” of sex and class, pleasure and edge. Inside, the place is full of both the tiara-wearing bachelorette crowd and the hipster lounge set, all carousing over Missy Elliott’s thunderous beats.
As club-goers pack the front near a thin stage, a woman is taking photographs, and a bouncer tells her no pictures are allowed. She complains, and another man chirps in, “They’re just going topless.”
If only. At 12:30 promptly, the corner of the stage swivels around to reveal a three-piece trio: a bassist, a bald drummer with dark sunglasses and a red fez, and the point man, a tenor sax player, who provides a rough sonic massage of throaty, growly tenor sax covers of Ellington, Zeppelin and Sinatra (as in Nancy, as in “These Boots Were Made for Walking”).
The first dancer, an attractive redhead with angular features, appears in a black sequined gown, a bluish-green boa and matching gloves. She spins herself across the stage, wrapping her body in the beaded curtains that hang at the edge of the stage. The gloves and boa soon vanish, and with a tug of a zipper on the front of her dress, it slides off her shoulders like a rain coat. Her bra comes off to reveal a smaller, semi-transparent one, holding the audience briefly in her grasp. She swings back and forth from the ceiling, and the promise of more dancing and more skin hangs in the air with her. Then she gives us a wink and is gone.
Her colleague, vaguely Polynesian, comes out moments later and blisters through a tumultuous, joyous performance, grabbing onto a ring and spinning like a top. The crowd woo-hooo!s as she removes the same black sequined gown and strips down to the same semi-transparent bra. Then she’s gone, too. The club music comes back on, and that’s the end of that.
Maybe the most obvious thing about nakedness in Las Vegas is how commercial it is. The body, perhaps more here than anywhere else, sells. If Friedler could afford to pay his subjects, he’d likely have enough for two books.
Well into his photo shoot, I talk to a trio of dancers: Two perform in Jubilee; a third has recently left the show for the Folies Bergere. Nakedness in Vegas is “not about the beauty of the body,” says Elizabeth Schenkel, moments after walking out of her shoot with Friedler. “It’s not like Europe. They’re more relaxed about their body.”
We want to emulate the Europeans and their mythic casual regard for the naked body. If only we could see it as an objet d’art. What we’ve ended up doing is engineering our look at the body, in true American fashion. We’ve scrubbed out the titillation so that the body may appear to us unadorned. We make a point of dialing down our gaze so that it is straightforward and fast and easily unimpressed, eagerly nonchalant. It’s just toplessness.
We are right to demystify the body, but we should not strip it entirely of mystery, of unpredictability. We don’t want to lose the pleasure of discovering its many moods. What make the body a body at all, rather than a lump of flesh, are the ideas we impart on it with the way we present it and appraise it.
Friedler describes his photographic approach as “very minimal, very raw, very beautiful.” The unadorned body, the documentary body, is still but one window into the soul, which we would realize if only we allowed ourselves time and space to stare.
T.R. Witcher is the associate editor at Las Vegas Life magazine.