In Atlanta, strip clubs such as Magic City function as nodes of influence in the global music industry. Dancers decide which tracks are played, which artists gain recognition, and which sounds define the city’s creative pulse. Within this economy of movement and rhythm, women act as cultural producers and arbiters of taste, unofficial gatekeepers of a multibillion-dollar industry.

Atlanta Made Us Famous by Hajar Benjida examines the visual, social, and economic structures that define Atlanta’s strip club scene – a space where performance, labour, and visibility intersect. Rather than depicting spectacle, Benjida turns her camera toward the complex systems that sustain the culture of hip hop: backstage rituals, domestic spaces, and moments of collective care.

Benjida’s photographs reveal this ecosystem from within. They show the dancers not merely as performers but as workers, mothers, and caretakers; figures whose labour extends beyond the stage. Backstage scenes show preparation and mutual support, pictures of the money count after performances mark the immediacy of economic exchange, and images of domestic settings show continuity, responsibility, and tenderness. Through these juxtapositions, the work makes visible what is usually unseen: the everyday infrastructure behind the glamour of the stripclub, the negotiation between care and survival, between visibility and control.

In this negotiation between visibility and control, the act of looking itself becomes central. The exchange between the women and the viewer is neither submissive nor confrontational but deliberate, an assertion of presence on their own terms. The women in Benjida’s photographs challenge specific visual conventions through which especially Black female bodies have often been framed, while speaking from their own lived realities. Their gestures and gazes emerge from a distinct cultural and economic context, shaped by Atlanta’s strip club ecosystem and by the intersections of labour, survival, and performance.

As writer and theorist bell hooks observed in her essay The Oppositional Gaze (1992), the simple act of looking back can be a form of resistance. To look, and to look back, becomes a way to claim one’s right to see and to be seen differently. Benjida’s portraits make that idea tangible. The women’s composed gazes neither invite nor retreat; they return the look, confronting the viewer with the assumptions that shape how visibility, desire, and respectability are constructed. In this exchange, the viewer becomes implicated as the photographs resist passive consumption. They ask who controls the image, who defines respectability, and who has the right to be seen. Benjida’s camera does not extract or expose, it collaborates: as a result, her portraits embody a form of authorship that lies between autonomy and vulnerability, between labour and intimacy.

Motherhood and care appear as central threads throughout the work. The representation of the house mom, usually an older woman who guides, supports, and protects, mirrors the intergenerational structure of the community. Such matriarchal relationships shift the perception of the strip club from a site of fantasy into a network of solidarity, showing that cultural production and care are not separate forces but intertwined forms of labour.

Through this lens, Atlanta Made Us Famous becomes more than a portrait of a local scene. It redefines what it means to look, to work, and to be seen. The series refuses to moralise or to sensationalise; instead, it opens a space where the embodied agency, labour, and presence of the dancers become the foundation of a broader cultural narrative, one that challenges dominant expectations of beauty, purity, and power in Western visual culture.

HAJAR BENJIDA is a Moroccan-Dutch photographer and visual artist based in New York. Her personal work takes an intimate and documentary approach, from photographing some of today’s biggest names in hip-hop to capturing the strip club scene in Atlanta and its impact on the music industry and narratives around women and the agency of their bodies. Hajar graduated from HKU University of the Arts Utrecht in 2019 with a BA in photography. Her debut exhibition was held at Art Basel at Scope Art Fair Miami 2018 with her project Young Thug as Paintings, made in collaboration with Young Thug himself. She was the recipient of LensCulture’s 2019 Emerging Talent Award and her project, Atlanta Made Us Famous was selected by Unseen as one of nine outstanding graduation projects of 2019, Foam Talent 2021 and the BJP International Photography Award 2022. Hajar's accomplishments also put her on the list of Forbes 30 under 30 Arts & Culture Europe 2022.

AYA MUSA is a curator at Foam. Prior to this, he was a curator and head programmer at the Nederlands Fotomuseum. In his work, Aya combines social developments with new exhibition forms, where photography is not subordinate to the context from which it arises, but at the same time never loses sight of this context. In this way, he gives photography a stage that goes beyond existing clichés. Since 2001, he has combined his work in the Netherlands with empirical ethnographic research into the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent. Currently, Aya is studying the photographic representation of victims of sectarian violence in the region.