Peep Show

We had just missed the train to our hometown Groningen in the Netherlands. Next train was leaving in more than one hour.

“Lets go and eat another mac and drink another milkshake”, one of us proposed. Those burger things had been the reason we had missed our train. “Let`s go to the Peepshow, it`s nearby”, was another proposure.

10 minutes after, 8 tall players of a junior basketball team were folding themselves in the characteristic flavour smelling cabins of a Peepshow at de Nieuwenijk in Amsterdam. To be able to get a two minutes glimp of a striptease girl, some money had to be thrown in the machine inside the cabin, and that "gift" would made a small window open itself.
A naked girl on a 360 degrees turning platform of freedom, was moving her body in "exiting" poses.

In the mirror behind the striptease girl I could see my teammates desperately looking for more coins while their windows slowly closed. I don`t remember at all what the girl was looking like. It was the show my teammates had given that had enjoyed me.

10 minutes after, we were standing outside, unhandy giggling, in the busy shopping street of Amsterdam.

About 7 years later, I stayed in a cheap hotel in Paris. To kill the time between two meetings, I walked around Centre Pompidou on a rainy january afternoon.

I met an American photographer of my age, that I knew from Milan. He told he me he was doing an exiting photo serie. He had noticed that the Parisian prostitutes hardly seemed to care about the winter cold. Standing at the doors of the hotels with roomrenting possibilities for 10 minutes, they showed continuously all their qualities in sexy lingeries under their furcoats.

“They won`t be glad you picture them”, I said. “Of course not! I`m hiding my camera under my coat and shoot them secretly”, he replied.

“Cool”! I had also noticed those women and they had also intregued me.

"Lets do something similar and exiting", I thought. "I can do a Peepshow version of the prostitution phenomena". I had seen a Peepshow near my hotel, and if the cabin and window situation is like in Amsterdam some years ago, I could also hide my camera under my coat.

In my hotelroom I practised the idea. The shutter of the cam was to noisy, so I wrapped the cam in a T-shirt. I needed a very sensitive film as I could not check te light inside the Peepshow. 3200 Asa will do. I guess the girls can see me, as I could see my teammates in the mirror years before. I had to be carefull. I was affraid peepshow owners were not the easiest persons to convince and calm down, by just telling them that I was not a real perfert, or a blackmailer, but a discreet fashion photographer working on an art serie.

My length made it easy to hang the camere on chest hight, peeping with the lens trough an opening in my wintercoat, and have it just in front of the little window made on the average men hight.

A week later, back in Milan, where i lived in those years, I developed the two films that I had shot. I had no idea what could be on it. I had hardly seen the striptease girls in the show, `cause I had been to concerned about taking the pictures. Taking the film out of the develop tank and hanging it to dry, I realised that the pictures were scaringly good! I could even see clearly the faces of the men in the cabins at the other side.

Making photo montages out of them (This was far before the photoshop times), I could be discreet to either the girls and the men.
In the same year, I made other Peepshow series in Amsterdam.
The Peep Show series has been publiced in MAX, Playboy and Nieuwe Revu.

EDLAND MAN Photography and Art

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Peep Show