Vee Speers:
Love and Money

PHOTOGRAPHY | VEE SPEERS       WORDS | MICHELLE MEDINA

Vee Speers transfuses the grace and gestures of early photographic erotica into a powerful mixture of sensuality, mystery, and lust. Her photographs can be seen as smorgasbord of works by Horst P. Horst, Man Ray, the Ziegfeld Girls, and nudie fetish postcards. The result is a discussion of the lure and power of the feminine; as if viewing the work is to suggest a rendezvous in a small room or a seduction in the dark. You wonder if this is for love or money.

Clearly, Speers’ work pays its respects to early erotica, especially erotica of the 1920’s and the neighborhood where she resides- a red-light district, the Rue St. Denis in Paris. Speers says of the view, "From my window I can see the girls waiting downstairs in the doorways, and it has always fascinated me how these women display their bodies up and down the street like gaudy trinkets in a second-hand shop."

What inspiration do the streetwalkers give her work? Is it the "sleaziness" of the business that adds an element of danger or perhaps an equivocal pleasure of its presence? Is it that vintage erotica inspires an arousal of a simpler sexuality- of one that was new and beginning, more innocent? Women in vintage erotica were most likely prostitutes in bordellos that inspired artists with their bold sense of self. They explored the hidden secrets of their bodies, welcoming the admiration and evoking lust and desire.

No doubt the locations of Speers' photo shoots add ambiance and romance to her photographs. Speers states that she has worked "in some bordellos where the décor had survived intact to use as locations. They were so lavish and decadent. Most of the clothes are from that era." These small details are evident in the quality of the photos- the world where her woman stand only exists in fantasy for most of us.

Vee Speers has also found a muse in women around Paris locales- her models are friends or strangers new to modeling with real womanly bodies. With the model, Speers is able to recreate the shyness and daring of an age long past. It is an age when cameras required entire crews of individuals to operate. A time when flash bulbs caught fire and small pieces of erotica where sold in back alleys for a dime. The work of Vee Speers invokes an idealized nostalgia to be sure, but a welcome one as well.

In the series Bordello, Vee Speers used a special technique called the Direct Charcoal process by the Atelier Fresson in France. The technique involves using only a few colors, primarily black ivory on watercolor paper. This grants the images to appear soft and painted, adding a weathered quality to the pictures. The print is carried out straight from the original black and white negative with a technique made possible by a continuous and artificial source of UV exposure.

Like Man Ray before her, the print creation process is an important step in the work of Vee Speers. Of her prints she says, "It was very important to reproduce my photographs for this series using a hand-rendered technique, so I chose the Fresson charcoal process which gives a more authentic, painterly quality to the images. Although I'm an avid supporter of traditional printing techniques from silver gelatine, to platinum, gum bichromate and carbon, I feel, however, that it's important to expand our horizon beyond the safety-net of tradition towards the obvious future of image and its application through digital technology."

Vee Speers was born in Australia and studied Fine Art and Photography at the Queensland College of Art. She later worked as a stills photographer with ABC Television in Sydney, capturing images of actors and celebrities for publicity in Australia and overseas. Speers has been living in Paris for 15 years working in fashion, photojournalism, and fine art photography. In 1994 she completed a series of drag queens taken backstage in the Cabaret’s in Pigalle. The series has been exhibited in Paris, Italy, London, and Japan as well as the Griffin Museum of Photography in January 2006.