Red Light

Last night was the second photographic session for the charity I’m working with, and this time we went round the red-light areas, providing sandwiches, warm drinks and the like to the working girls. In some ways it was a strangely unproductive night, I only got six or seven photos out of the two and a bit hours of work, but thankfully all of them should be useable by the charity.

I can understand a lot of the difficulties, in that a lot of the girls/women don’t want their photos taken, and it does take a degree of sensitivity for their situation. It also didn’t help that apparently a lot of the women who were out last night were new, and not known to the charity already, which obviously makes the entire thing a bit of an uphill struggle, to say the least.

I’m almost certainly going to be going out on a couple more occasions yet with the charity – I’d like to get some more shots, and build up the portfolio, as well as providing more images for the charity to use, instead of the semi-small sample of about 40 that I’ve come up with so far.

It’s odd though, being out in that environment. There are so many stories, so many people – the charity has dealt with 300 different women already this year. One girl last night was only 20, had a 1 year old baby at home being looked after by her sister, and had been raped the previous night. A punter who had asked her how much, then taken it for free. She was encouraged to report it to the police, but it’s likely that the attitude will be one of “well, she was asking for it”; as though it’s almost OK to rape a working girl, “it’s more theft than rape”. Words fail me at that point.