September 2011
La Petite Mort Gallery presents:
JOAO CANZIANI
Canadian Café Bar
New Photographs
In collaboration with the Embassy of Peru
The artist will be present, from New York City, for the opening.
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September 9 – 22, 2011
Vernissage Friday September 9 / 7 – 10pm
Tunes by Big Mac Daddy
Artist Statement
For a few Peruvian “soles” the girls of Canadian Café Bar will talk to you, flirt with you, make you feel special. This is how it works: You buy them a drink and they’ll sit with you. Buy them a few and they’ll spend the whole night with you. But they won’t sleep with you, although some men have tried, and probably gotten away with it.
I met one of the girls after stumbling upon a “sexy calendar” photo shoot she was posing for at a beach in Lima. I asked her if I could shoot her sometime. She said, sure. I naively thought she would be eager to do it. Instead it took a bit of negotiating. I had to pay her. She took it seriously though, and offered to do whatever I wanted while we were together.
She worked at the bar for the same reason she posed for me, to pay for her school. Most of these girls didn’t do it for pleasure, but out of necessity: To survive in the big city after moving here from the Amazon, for instance; or to feed a child out of wedlock. These women came from humble origins, unlike the girls I grew up with before I moved away.
I left Lima, Peru when I was barely a teenager. My latent curiosity for the opposite sex to be satisfied somewhere new. These portraits are an attempt to revisit this curiosity. I too wanted to see how it felt to be in the company of these women, by making a connection through the act of photography. I discovered this brought me closer to a place I call my home.
Merci,
Guy Berube, director