The photographer who used government money to take pictures of prostitutes

In this spotlight piece, staff writer Jude Jones looks at American photographer Philip-Lorca diCorcia and his project Strangers (since renamed Hustlers), portraits of male prostitutes he took on the streets of West Hollywood in the early ‘90s using a U.S.-government endowment. The images, which contain elements of documentary, the cinematic, and the Baroque, became cutting commentaries of life on the margins of the American dream, considering loneliness, lies, sex, and violence in Reaganism’s wake.