Julia's work pushes the envelope in areas you wouldn't expect. Whether she's documenting the complex relationship between mothers and daughters, or capturing the raw energy of feral children across the globe, the worlds she creates are as immersive and detailed as they are thought-provoking. Each viewing brings new meaning and clarity to solid and purposeful vision, and we can't look away.

Why do some women choose to get involved with the sex industry? The UK-based photographer put a year into finding out

Photographer Julia Fullerton-Batten's latest project, The Act, captures women in the sex industry in theatrical scenes and allows them to tell their own stories.

Few industries are as controversial as the sex industry. And few workers are as judged, stigmatised and heaped with the pre-conceived notions of others as sex workers.

It was these ideas that lead London-based photographer Julia Fullerton-Batten to turn her lens to women who use their bodies to earn a living, in an attempt to understand what might lead a person to go into sex work by choice. The resulting photobook, called The Act, features escorts, pornstars, lap and pole-dancers, a stripper, a webcam girl, sex “slaves”, a dominatrix, a burlesque dancer; aerial artistes and a ping pong girl. Each is depicted on a stage to highlight how their work involves an element of performance. 
 

My most recent projects have involved social commentary on various aspects of past and present society. The role of the sex industry in today’s society and sex-worker rights have been heavily debated and disputed in recent years. The content of these often heated discussions have interested me and I finally decided to take on the challenge of building a project around the work and lives of young women engaged in the sex industry. As a fine-art photographer and despite my own personal open-mindedness, I approached this particular project with some trepidation as I knew it could be controversial and, in some respects, overstep the boundary between erotic fine-art imagery and pornography. The project is comprehensive and includes main images of the women ‘at work’, personal portraits of each of them, a video and written ‘stories’ of their lives built up from my interviews with them.

In her new fine art series "The Act," photographer Julia Fullerton-Batten addresses the sex industry through the women who choose to work within it. Presented individually on tailor-made sets, her subjects include escorts, porn stars, burlesque performers, strippers, erotic dancers, and a dominatrix. Each image is accompanied by an interview, conducted by Fullerton-Batten herself. At the heart of the project is an exploration of agency—as an adult, as a woman, as a sexual being. 

In her new fine art series “The Act,” photographer Julia Fullerton-Batten addresses the sex industry through the women who choose to work within it. Presented individually on tailor-made sets, her subjects include escorts, porn stars, burlesque performers, strippers, erotic dancers, and a dominatrix. Each image is accompanied by an interview, conducted by Fullerton-Batten herself. At the heart of the project is an exploration of agency—as an adult, as a woman, as a sexual being. 

“I wanted to approach the [sex industry] in a completely different way,” Fullerton-Batten explains over the phone. “Most photographers do more behind-the-scenes—the nitty-gritty, black-and-white. It’s normally quite negative. I wanted to show something very beautiful, very aesthetic,” she continues. “It’s meant to be a reflection of the modern woman and the choices that we have.” 

Raised between Germany, the U.S., and the U.K., and currently based in London, Fullerton-Batten picked up a camera as a young teenager. “My father used to do photography as a hobby,” she recalls. “We lived in Pennsylvania, and he would travel to New York and come back with all these amazing images of women in miniskirts running down Fifth Avenue.”

After beginning her career in advertising, Fullerton-Batten broke into the art world over a decade ago with “Teenage Stories,” her study of girlhood and adolescence. Since then, she has exhibited her images across the world at the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Pompidou in Paris, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Shanghai. For different series over the years, she photographed both professional and non-professional models. In 2015’s “Feral Children,” for example, she had child actors recreate scenes of famous children raised outside of society. In 2013’s “Blind,” the focus is on the subject’s personal stories.

In 1845, so the legend goes, an unclothed girl was spotted running on all fours through the wilderness near Del Rio, Texas, appearing barely human. Joined by a pack of wolves, the young girl allegedly attacked a herd of goats. The tale, though often ridiculed, spread like wildfire, and before long a group of Mexican vaqueros teamed up to hunt for the mythical Lobo Wolf Girl. 

On the third day of searching, the group supposedly captured the young girl by Espantosa Lake, surrounded by wolves. She was captured but soon escaped, tearing planks off a boarded-up window and escaping without a trace into the night. In 1852, she was said to be spotted for the final time, suckling two wolf cubs. After that, she was never seen or heard from again. 

Stories like this, hovering in an area closer to fiction than truth, reappear throughout history, popping up in different spots around the globe for centuries. Every story is unique yet familiar -- a child, lost or neglected, takes up in the wild with the creatures residing there, adapting to their characteristics and modes of survival, slowly melting into their species. Instances of such feral children have been reported from 1845 to 2008, in habitats ranging from Cambodia to Russia to the United States.