Boystown: LA Zona De Tolerancia

by Bill Wittliff (Editor)

Stark, compelling images from border-town brothels

In the early 1970s, Boystown was a collection of brothels along the border between Texas and Mexico, where cowboys and college boys, gang members and family men, drunkenly traveled desert highways to dance to six-piece Tejano bands, guzzle cheap liquor, and pay for sex. A group of photographers worked these clubs every night, shooting sharp, in-your-face souvenir pictures of girls with round faces quietly smoking while men fondled them and cowboys danced on tables. These shimmering flash photos of prostitutes and their johns appear here for the first time, along with formal portraits of the women and their families taken by the same anonymous club photographers.

In 1974, screenwriter and photographer Bill Wittliff went to Boystown and contacted several of the photographers who took pictures at the brothels. He has archived thousands of their negatives, the discards of the souvenir business, and preserved them for posterity. This remarkable volume provides the first opportunity for the rest of us to witness the mesmerizing world of Boystown through the eyes of a group of photographers who were an integral part of that world.

Boystown is published in association with the Wittliff Gallery of Southwestern and Mexican Photography at Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas.

Genres: Photography

108 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 2000

Reviews

[Evan · Rating 2 out of 5]

This was on the shelf at Half Price books in the erotic photography section (which consists of one sparsely stocked shelf). It's basically a black and white photo book with some introductory copy by three or four experts on the Mexican-US border brothel scene of the '70s. A couple of the essays have a pseudo intellectual/sociological bent. The first is by the guy who pulled this project together; his original intention was to make a film about the border brothels. Instead, he cobbled together these sad, banal and oddly invigorating photos of grubby gringos and average Mexican laborers with hot pants-wearing bar hookers on their laps, over their knees; kissing or fondling or grabbing their exposed breasts, tonguing their clits and so on. The book was only $5.98 and I was tempted to buy it; though I wouldn't call any of this book erotic. The men and women in it aren't pretty for the most part, but the palpable sense of their desires for sex or survival gives the photos a kind of unintentional beauty. Hard to explain. I pretty much got through this book in a few minutes and put it back on the shelf. Interesting but not essential.