Buck, an accomplished portraitist known for his work with celebrities and politicians, including four U.S. Presidents, elicits blinding candor from his subjects. (“I photographed George McGovern in a Speedo—you’d be shocked what people would do for a photograph, if you ask the right way,” he told me.) His portraits in “Gentlemen’s Club” embody the clashing realities of the strip club: posed but never unnatural, the pictures are, by turns, playful, tender, brazen, and inscrutable. One man, Jerrod—all of the subjects are referred to only by their first names—reclines on a bed wearing a leopard-print shirt that’s open down to his sternum. His girlfriend’s name, Gabriella, is tattooed over his heart, and he’s gazing almost seductively into the camera. He says that he understands the pleasure she might derive from her work. “I don’t exactly have a muscular physique, and sometimes some of her customers at the club do,” he says. “And let’s say she has her moment with them as she works. I think it’s O.K. to gain that personal satisfaction without crossing those boundaries.” He always makes sure, he says, that there’s something for Gabriella to eat when she gets home. Karley, from New Orleans, holds her partner, Emma, on piggyback during a downpour, her feet submerged in water, as Emma sticks her tongue out to catch the rain. Karley says that she lived under a bridge as a teen-ager and rode across the country on freight trains. She reveres Emma’s broadmindedness and attributes it, in part, to her profession. “It’s definitely helped her self-esteem a lot,” Karley says, “because people are literally paying hundreds of thousands of dollars just to look at her butt.”
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