‘Boystown: La Zona De Tolerancia’ Rare Photo Book

Boystown: La Zona de Tolerancia. With essays by Cristina Pacheco, David Hickey and Keith Carter. Afterword by Bill Wittliff.

Hardcover with white spine lettering. In illustrated dust jacket. Black & white portraits of prostitutes with their clients along with formal portraits of the women and their families shot by anonymous photographers. 108 pp. Oblong, 30 x 27 cm.

. Published by Aperture, New York, 2000. Great condition. FIRST EDITION.

  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 108 pages
  • Item weight ‏ : ‎ 300 g
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 30.48 x 1.91 x 27.94 cm

Asking USD$150. Collector’s Item.

 

Selling Here for USD$850!!: Madness 

https://www.jhbooks.com/pages/books/177389/keith-carter-cristina-pacheco-dave-hickey-bill-wittliff/boystown-la-zona-de-tolerancia

 

Stark, compelling images from border-town brothels

In the early 1970s, Boystown was a collection of brothels along the border between Texas and Mexico, where cowboys and college boys, gang members and family men, drunkenly traveled desert highways to dance to six-piece Tejano bands, guzzle cheap liquor, and pay for sex. A group of photographers worked these clubs every night, shooting sharp, in-your-face souvenir pictures of girls with round faces quietly smoking while men fondled them and cowboys danced on tables. These shimmering flash photos of prostitutes and their johns appear here for the first time, along with formal portraits of the women and their families taken by the same anonymous club photographers.

In 1974, screenwriter and photographer Bill Wittliff went to Boystown and contacted several of the photographers who took pictures at the brothels. He has archived thousands of their negatives, the discards of the souvenir business, and preserved them for posterity. This remarkable volume provides the first opportunity for the rest of us to witness the mesmerizing world of Boystown through the eyes of a group of photographers who were an integral part of that world.

Boystown is published in association with the Wittliff Gallery of Southwestern and Mexican Photography at Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas.

 

Reviews:

– “There is nothing artistic about a bicycle seat and a set of handlebars until Pablo Picasso turns them into a bull’s head. Bill Wittliff has accomplished a similar feat by collecting and preserving a bunch of whorehouse souvenir photographs which explain to us quite clearly that the Rio Grande Valley is a separate culture; that it has a soul, a personality, and a voice to speak for itself. The redemptive quality of these photographs is their ability to remind those of us who live in South Texas and North Mexico of our real country and our place in it as parts, not embodiments, of culture.”–Tommy Lee Jones


– “In Boystown, Bill Wittliff–through his insightfulness and perseverance–has compiled a collection of images from a world we’d otherwise never know; a record of a time and a place–mysterious and hidden–provided by anonymous photographers who were an integral part of that world. Here are images of old men with childlike girls, young boys with middle-aged women, mothers with their babies–any and all combinations revealed in all their humanness and terrible in their forlornness. Here too, the undisguised portraits of women taken in a makeshift studio, mimicking familiar iconography–poses made famous by movie stars as photographed by Horst or Hurrell–only here the light is a little harsher, less forgiving, and there has been no retouching. ” -Jessica Lange
 
 

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