Sex-Theater

André Gelpke's 1970s documentary series on the performers of Hamburg's St. Pauli sex theaters, reissued in an expanded edition with new texts.

Working inside Hamburg's Reeperbahn sex clubs over several years, Gelpke photographed the performers between and during acts. He treated them less as spectacle than as individuals negotiating a public trade in private fantasy. As he put it, his fascination came "from the personality of the individual, from the performer who was prepared to realize in public the secret sexual fantasies of an inhibited society, simply in exchange for a fee." The series first appeared as a book in 1981 and sold out quickly. This 2015 edition, co-published by Spector Books and cpress, expands the original selection to 170 black-and-white duotone plates over 216 pages. New contextual essays accompany the plates. They frame a milieu, and its subsequent decline, that has since largely disappeared.

Gelpke (b. 1947) studied under Otto Steinert at the Folkwang School in Essen. He co-founded the Visum photo agency before turning to independent artistic work in the late 1970s. He became, alongside Heinrich Riebesehl and Michael Schmidt, one of the central figures of West German art photography of the period. From 1990 to 2012 he headed the photography program at Zurich University of the Arts. His work has been shown at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Museum Folkwang, and the Centre Pompidou. Sex-Theater remains one of his most widely referenced bodies of work.