"Diary of a Sex Tourist" is a companion piece of sorts to my project on sex workers in the Dominican Republic, "Sosua". Taken with my phone while working on that project, the photos here weren't originally conceived as forming a project in itself. I had edited together my favorite snapshots and posted them on my website as "Phoney Diana Cibao" "“ referring to the fact they are fake Diana toy camera shots, taken on a phone (using the Vignette app), of the Cibao, the northern region of the DR where I shot most of the sex worker project.
Part of the impact doing "Sosua" had on me, based on learning about the lives of of the sex workers there, was to politicize me in regard to sex worker rights and to become an advocate for decriminalization, as articulated by many sex worker blogger/activists and rights organizations. As I've read countless pro- and anti-decriminalization articles and essays, I came to realize that the stigmatization and endangerment of sex workers coupled with various forms of criminalization is deeply intertwined with the stigmatization, and increasing demonization and criminalization, of their clients (often as a result of conflating consensual adult sex work with sex trafficking). In the course of doing "Sosua" I became a regular client of one of the women I met, who appears in many of these photos, and I continue to visit her in the DR. I had without a doubt become a "sex tourist." So I now saw this collection of snapshots as a diary of a sex tourist and chose that provocative title as my bid to confront the stigmatization of sex worker clients and the role their stigmatization plays in maintaining the criminalization of sex work and in repressing the rights of sex workers and their ability to make a living as safely as possible.
There is nothing salacious about the photos, which is kind of the point. A reflection of the reality I saw and experienced, hopefully it demystifies and destigmatizes the world of sex work a bit, as with "Sosua."
