Customer Reviews

Boystown: La Zona de Tolerancia

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Fun book for coffee table in billiard/game room. The academic who wrote no young American pictures are included as some type of conspiracy must have not been down there with a group of friends drinking cheap beer, because they would have bought their pictures too!

Good times, great memories, fun book...

This book will knock your socks straight off. These photographs were taken by, apparently, amateur photographers, but they are simply magical. Although these photographs were [taken] in Mexican brothels, they speak volumes about the American Southwest. A must have for collectors of the great photography books of our time. Part of the permanent OilCan collection.

This facinating volume of amatuer photography taken in the brothels of 1970's Boystown in Mexico asks far more questions than it answers. Yet even the most voyueristic among us probably wouldn't want the answers to most of the questions posed by these pictures. You may need a shower and a breath mint by the time you are done reading/gazing at this tome! I want to highly reccommend this book, but I'm not sure to whom. There is little if anything erotic about it. The photography itself has an understated style to it but is clearly amatuerish. I suppose if you are facinated with the photographic subjects of Diane Arbus, as I am, you will be drawn into the pages of Boystown. This book is not about how the other half lives. In fact it seems like another planet to me. Check it out.

I don't normally review non-academic work, but having conducted field research on La Zona in the early 1970s, I will make an exception for this strange compilation that has many problems. The first is the title: the name of a brothel complex, indeed, but that is not the subject mattter of this book which is composed of photos taken there that were rejected by prostitutes, their clients,and others because they lacked sufficient merit to be purchased, for whatever reason."Rejected Brothel Scene Photos" is a descriptively accurate title.

This book is void of substance. It tells no story, provides no analysis, offers no useful commentary, makes no comparative statements, and provides no insight. It is a nicely bound, physical embodiment of an offer heard nightly in the border city:
"Hey, Mister, you wanna buy some pictures?" The street photos, however, are honest as they accomplish their intended goal: they are pornographic.

La Zona, in the early 1970s, was a huge, thriving, enterprise: a major center of night life which often drew more visitors on the evening than did The Alamo during the day. But there is nothing in the book to tell that tale. The photos are occasionally surrounded by snippets of material by the authors but theese are very general in nature and refer to no specific item, region, area, practice, social group, behavior, or context actually on the site: babble at a distance, as it were.

In the Afterword, Wittliff discusses how he acquired over 7,000 photos, from which he made the final selection for the book which is, sadly, an odd, crude, unbelievably distorted, brothel picture book. There is nothing wrong with that. We live in a free enterprise system, anything to make a buck is permitted, even if it capitralizes on almost every imaginable stereotype.

How could a book concerning Mexican brothels offer so much distortion? The sites themselves are vert straightforward. The answer lies in how the sample was collected. The images are not representative of the scenebecause they were selected from discards (photos not sold)shot by the roaming photographers whoo also has a small shop. Yhis biases the depiction of La Zona by choosing photos that had no appeal for those for whom they were created. The pictures that accomplished their goal were sold, so the reader is forced to view the scene through a very peculiar lens: an array of unsold, failed photos. Literally, a sample composed of rejects that no one would buy.

But this tale gets worse. When the compiler fails to distinguish between public settings and private ones, he engages in a gross violation of privacy. Most of the photos in the book were never inrtended for, and should never have been put in, public view. That is voyeurism, pure and simple, and connot be justified. The historical record does not require bathroom shots, photos taken in private quarters, or personal photos intended for one's family or friends. Wittliff is a professional photographer and knows the difference between a public and a private setting. That he failed to act on this knowledge is totlly inexcusable, and profoundly unethical.

Aside from bad taste, i.e., rejected photos, and voyeurism, ther are serious shortcomings concerning veracity and overall reliabnility. Some photos are misleading (there are no children living on the zone; girls don't keep babies in their rooms) and there are major ommissions. There is a noticeable, almost studied, absence of youthful Americans (the most important type of client) and there are no images of the major clubs (which cater to them), nor are there any photos of the many recreational settings. No occupational role runs around the
clock. Even hookers get off from work.hen trhey do, there is a rather rich, varied, and complex social world that emerges in the "after hours". No photos capture that contrext, however. On contexts, in fact, are ever specified, discussed, examined, or explored. What do the photos mean? How typical are they? They all require interpretation, but none is offered.

So, what do these photos show? What is the major theme? These photos exploit the non-photogenic: Mexican women doing what they must to survive, and patrons who opted not to acquire a photo of either themselvbes and/or the former. Rejected photos also violate a sense of personal decorum in that none on the scene would pay for unflattering images.

There are only scraps here for the historical record, i.e.,those photos shot in public settings, and all of the photos serve to divert the reader's attention from an embarrassing truth: a sharp Mexican photographer successfully unloaded his discards on someone who thought that they were examples of "realism." That an artist, a cultural critic and a journalist went along for this tide simply shows that smart folks can also be gullible.

Maybe the photos have some merit that I am missing. To rest this hypothesis I located all of the photos of my informants(girls I recognized in the photos, then knew well, and who helped me in my research) and carefully scrutinized them. A few were photographed in club settings, but most were taken in the photo shop. I suspect that the photos would have been shared with their parents or given to a boyfriend, but they were horrible:
bad lighting, poor backdrop, eyes as if in a trance, and odd framing. No charm at all. These photos (club and shop) were, understandably and accurately, rejected.

This book is a tragic example of how not to study a social scene. First, provide moralistic tone, then observe nothing, explore litrtle, talk to no one, and buy a large number of discarded photos that someone else took. The authors were, quite simply, conned. These photos have little valkue, save for teaching a useful methodological lesson: when you look gor your data in the garbage, you unsurprisingly find trash.

Regarding the higher purposes that supposedly motiated and justify this strange assemblage of pictures, I'll believe them when any of the authors permits his/her daughter to be "realistically" photographed for "the historical record." No historian will touch these photos as the first question any scholar in the humanities or social sciences asks is: What is the social context? Without knowing this, interpretation is futile and meaning is impossible to discern. Even the "realism" of the corpse requires someone to tell its story, absent that, all you have is the grotesque.

There is a final problem, Private images of women were used without their consent, for material gain, and preserved for posterity. Since the book has no artistic or academic value, a suitable atonement would be donating a percentage of royalties rto a women's shelter. This way, when the vuyeurs get their rocks off, at least something of social value will accrue to a population in need.