Jo Weldon's New York School of Burlesque

Last fall I reviewed Lisa Kereszi's book, Fantasies. Burlesque continues to inspire visual artists, as it always has! There is a new interview with Lisa at Photoeye, one of my favorite photography websites. Also, Lisa's photo of my roommate, Julie Atlas Muz ( who is a visual artist as well as one of everybody's favorite burlesque performers, is in a new exhibition. The exhibition's press release: Sexy and the City New York Photographs July 9, 2009­August 28, 2009 Yossi Milo Gallery is pleased to announce Sexy and the City, a summer group show on view from Thursday, July 9, through Friday, August 28, 2009. Sexy and the City shows the alluring, romantic and sometimes scandalous side of New York¹s people and places. Capturing private, intimate moments and blatant displays of sexuality, these photographs span the decades from the 1940s to the present day, taken in landmark locations like the Brooklyn Bridge and in the quiet, out-of-the-way corners of the city. ...

All photos in this review are the intellectual property of Lisa Kereszi. I first became aware of Lisa's work when I saw this beautiful image of Julie Atlas Muz, taken in 2000, in BUST magazine in 2002: At that time I was photographing shows in a sort of impressionistic fashion, trying to give a sense of what it was like to attend a show without concentrating on the quality of the individual photographs. There was no flickr.com and it was difficult to describe the shows to people, so I ran several galleries on my website . Don Spiro and Laure Leber creating beautiful art images, and Norman Blake was taking journalistic shots, but at that time there weren't as many places to see images of burlesque shows. It was thrilling to see Lisa's images. The above image is from Show World , where the Va Va Voom Room played for awhile, and where Deb DeSalvo made her video for "Take It Off," the song she recorded for Jill Morley's documentary Stripped . I'm in the...