I would like to post and talk about Paolo Patrizi , Italian photographer based in Tokyo. He has done a project on Illegal immigration in Italy focussing on the many women who sell sex on the road by photographing the shelters or the sites where they operate. I like the concept used to show the issue on prostitution .
Here the link to the photo essay on the Saatchi Online Blog and a note by Paolo Patrizi :
The phenomenon of foreign women, who line the roadsides of Italy, has become a notorious fact of Italian life. They work in sub-human conditions; they are sent out at large without any hope of regularizing their legal status and can be easily inserted in criminal circles.
Most migrant women, including those who end up in the sex industry, have made a clear decision to leave home and take their chances overseas. They are headstrong and ambitious women who migrate in order to escape conflict, persecution, environmental degradation, natural disasters and other situations that affect their habitat and livelihood. One concern is that the anti-trafficking crusade is restricting international freedom of movement. What presents itself as a campaign to protect migrants from harm is actually making their efforts to flee home, to find work, to make the most of their lives in often difficult and unforgiving circumstances, that much harder. Migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry. There aren’t any romantic notions about sex work being particularly exotic. For the existence of forced migration or that, constrained by stringent border controls, many migrants are indeed pushed to take illegal routes across the world.
