This photographer is showing the mundane side of sex work:
avoids these tropes altogether, and does so by being entirely, and proudly, autobiographical. Ellie’s work has long been dedicated to documenting her everyday life and here she turns her attention to her working life as a full-service sex worker. “Sex work has changed me in complicated ways,” reads a plastic card hidden inside the book’s“I’ve been hardened by it, yet also softened. At times I’ve been exploited & mistreated, at others I couldn’t have loved my job more.
The curation of the book is also closely tied to Ellie’s personal narrative and, she says, was one of the biggest challenges creatively. Many shots that Ellie loved were cut from the book because she simply couldn’t get them to fit, while others surprised her by working their way in. “I wanted to create this feeling of not knowing what might come next. Of walking down corridors, hotel corridors, from one room to the next, one place to the next, to another man.
Despite loving the physicality of instant photography, the way the images can become marked, and changed, by their travels through the world, there’s also a practical element to working this way. Some of her photographs are of consenting clients. By using instant photography, she can give them peace of mind. “I can show them the image there and then,” she says. “If they want to, they can take it and keep it. There have been some images I really loved that the client chose to keep.
Alongside the mundanity captured here are moments of real intimacy. Of one of the photographs in the collection, Ellie writes: “‘London, February 2019’ shows myself and a client kissing. It’s challenging in many ways, unexpectedly tender and gentle, yet causing an uncomfortableness through its direct honesty. It’s confrontational, yet avoids being pure spectacle. Although now one of my favourite images, I was initially unsure whether it was one I was yet ready to share.”back in May.