Shopping for Pleasure Julie Sando

Excerpt from essay by Dick Goody: Julie Sando has been staking out massage parlors in a recent body of work. The level of disengagement from the subject in these new photographs, Best Sensuous Hands and its accompanying series Rudimentary (both 2004), is startling. Her most detached work to date, these site photographs convey an acute clinical distance emphasizing the deadpan banal pathos of these low facades and their entranceways. Mixing the metonymic and symbolic, “Tropical Relaxing Massage,” “Oriental Rose,” “Head Shoulder Waist Leg Foot,” and “Cleopatra Massage and Spa” are some of the photographed texts that lure in prospective shoppers. Shot in prosaic daylight, all glamour is leeched from these sampled images. Are they base facades or is there something brave in their fatigued doggedness to stay in business; are they documentary photographs, metaphors of alienation or is a social critique being perpetrated?