I just received this book from www.bamm.com. It is a great book of photos, mostly in color and high quality, of various working girls and locations (meaning massage parlors, etc.) throughout Asia, including Japan, Korea, China (including Macau and Hong Kong), Southeast Asia, and Thailand. I think it captures the scenes well, and is surprisingly excellent for this sort of thing. It runs under $25 and is highly recommended to those of you who are picture freaks or just plain interested (there is also some brief commentary in the front and back of the book, where the pictures are also indexed, but I haven't yet read the commentary).

It should also be mentioned that whereas the listing on bamm.com states it is published by Blind Spot Books, the copy I received states it is published in the United States by powerHouse Books, but then goes on to say the book was printed and bound in Italy. I mention this because the listings at bamm.com, amazon.com, etc., may vary somewhat given the rather ambiguous attribution of publisher, etc.

Just realized I should have said the "(Picture Book)" in the caption above was simply descriptive. If you decide to order the book, at bamm.com it is listed as "Orientalia."

Not that I want to dominate this thread or anything, but I just did a bit of research and found that some of the pictures from the book (none of the nude ones though) can be seen at http://www.artnet.com/artist/131443/Reagan_Louie.html, along with the photographer's rather extensive vita. An interview with the photographer, along with a few more pictures can be found at http://www.themodernist.com/terminal1/louie.html. Also, check out http://www.sfmoma.org/exhibitions/exhib_detail.asp?id=104 for one more small picture from the book and a description of a past exhibit of his work at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Maybe we should have Hombre give this guy a complementary subscription if he would just post his pics, even his rejects, here!!

I saw the Reagan Louie exhibit at the San Francisco MOMA last year. There was quite a bit of controversy among the PC crowd surrounding the exhibition, due to the nature of the topic matter: documenting sex work in East Asia and all those "oppressed" girls who are "sex slaves". Fortunately he's an Asian American photographer, so he could get away with it here in the bay area. If he had been Caucasian, it would have never gone up.

As it is, the photographs featured in the exhibit itself were technically fine, but I personally wasn't that impressed with what was on display. Putting aside the fact that I am quite intimate with the subject matter in ways that 99.9% of the audience were not, and thus somewhat jaded, I didn't find his composition to be very inspired or interesting. Most of the photographs were pretty straight forward; there was nothing extraordinary about them, which is what I expect from MOMA when they mount a major photographic exhibition.

Of course, I'm talking about the exhibit, and not the book. It is refreshing to see "the life" get documented and published in such a professional manner!