Missing: sex workers or public intervention?

Femke van Delft's photo exhibit "Missing: A Guerilla Mapping Project" at the Harcourt House is the best art I've seen in Edmonton since moving here. This is due, of course, to my singular interest in art that is political, that activates both aesthetic appreciation and civic passion (is that cheesy?). By pairing each photo of the fetishized legs with a brief text that offers statistics, laws, public opinion, and historic court cases regarding prostitutes, van Delft achieves a synthesis whereby beautiful images are loaded with meaning and emotion.

I can see the care she took in framing each image: the selection of locale (such as outside the costume store that stock's child-sized fishnet stockings at Halloween); the swishing neon-lighting so evocative of the nightscape; the disembodied legs that end just at the horizon of the shot, cutting off the viewer's expectations.

The static legs perfectly illustrate the female body's historic status as fetish-object. We see the leg-as-object everywhere, as in movie close-ups of stocking-packed legs alighting on stiletto-shod feet from a taxi in New York. In magazine adds or televsion commercials for any product we see smooth and shiny legs (or a bosom, or bare-back) make up the background of the shot. Remember those fuzzy-warm cutaways of the starlet's face in classic Hollywood films? These shots or images allow the viewer--the intended viewer being male--to remove the image from the narrative and any context, and enjoy the image as pure object in itself--a fetish object that is purely sexual.

I love the way van Delft has incorporated this idea into her work (at least in my opinion she has) to illustrate the complete separation of prostitutes from context and place, thus denying them any identity or individuality. They belong nowhere, no community sees the sex worker as an individual, as a mother (71% of the sex workers in Van-city have children), as more than a pair of legs on the corner. Until a rash of murders spark our interest. Until 50 women go missing from East Hastings, 500 aboriginal go missing from all over Canada.

This exhibition is the artist's rallying-cry to the public to get involved. We are what is missing in these pictures. We look on in disgust as Pickton pleads "not-guilty" to the 27 charges of murder he faces, but what are we doing to help the women of our cities that need affordable housing? What about the criminalizing of prostitution that denies these women rights and protection, and drives their work into the darkest corners of every city?