Biography:

Raúl Ortega was born in Mexico City in 1963. He worked as a photographer for the newspaper La Jornada from 1986-2000 and as coordinator and editor of the photographic supplement for this newspaper from 1998-2000.

His photographic work has been recognized by:
- The Association of Graphic Reporters in 1987
- The VI Biennial of Photographic Fine Arts (with Honors) in 1996
- The I Biennial of Journalistic Photography (with Honorable Mention in the area of Personajes (Characters) in 1994
- The 3rd. Biennial of Journalistic Photography (with the individual Journalistic Photography prize, and the Public prize) in 1991
- The XXI Photography Contest (3rd place for Anthropological Photography), 2001
- Various demonstrations and contests in Latin America (for which he has received Honorable Mentions)

He has had approximately seventy individual and collective expositions in Mexico as well as overseas and he has collaborated with the international agencies of Reuters, AP and AFP.

His work forms part of Bill Wittliff’s collection at Southwest Texas State University, as well as the collections of Carlos Monsivais and the Centro de la Imagen in Mexico City.
His images have been published in numerous newspapers and magazines in Mexico and worldwide. They have also been printed in approximately forty different books, two of which he authored: Pabellón Cero and De Fiesta.
Raúl is currently working as an independent photographer in collaboration with Mexican and foreign publishers, and is primarily focused on long term personal projects.

Statement:

Lap Dancers
In this photographic work I’ve attempted not just to look through the window; not just to be the spectator approaching, like a stranger, the world of lights, sounds, half-naked bodies, alcohol, and scandal known as "Night Club", where everything appears to be for sale: the waiter’s attention, the cigarettes, the bottles... and the dancers.

Women who take off their clothes and dance are desired by night and looked down upon by day. In the streets, people watch them out of the corner of their eye, but at night when they are working, they become objects of desire. Onlookers want not only to take off their clothes, but to actually possess them. They are dreams that can be bought, dancers who will say what their clients want to hear: a name and a story that will entice and seduce them. But the lap dancers are not naive: they are flittering birds just waiting to take flight in search of a new place, perhaps buy themselves a dream, become a truly new person. They live a scrawny reality in the daylight, a sweet lie in the shadows of the den until they turn, once again, into the queens of the night. But they are not only the nocturnal illusion of alcohol and boisterous men. They are also mothers, aunts, sisters, daughters of our society, of our conventional world where lap dancers, in the end, are meat to be consumed, sold to the highest bidder.