Katsu Naito's 1990s Meatpacking District Portraits Return to New York

Twenty-seven black-and-white photographs of sex workers in Manhattan's Meatpacking District went on view last week at New York Life Gallery in Chinatown. The exhibition, "Katsu Naito: West Side Rendezvous," curated by Joseph Akel, coincides with a new book of the same portraits, due out in 2026.

The images date from the 1990s, the years of the AIDS and crack epidemics. Many of the women Naito photographed were queer and trans, and were ignored or maligned by mainstream society. One recurring subject, Porsche Jones, remains in contact with the photographer to this day.

"Many people are unaware that the people I photographed even existed," Naito said in a video interview. The archive, he said, "preserves the fact that these women were there, living their lives on those streets."

Who is Katsu Naito?

Naito is now 62 and moved back to Japan last year. He arrived in the United States from Maebashi, Japan, in the late 1980s. Before the Meatpacking District work, and before his well-known 1990s Harlem photographs collected in the 2017 monograph "Once in Harlem," he trained his camera on the women who worked the district after hours, once the butchers had gone home and the air stank of blood and raw meat.

He embedded himself in their world. He brought coffee and hand warmers in the colder months, cracked jokes and listened to their stories long into the night. In some pictures the women pose like pinups or pouty cover girls; in all of them, they appear self-possessed.

"West Side Rendezvous" was first published as a book in 2011 by an independent publisher in London. The 500 copies sold out quickly.

What does the new exhibition contain?

Among the works on view is "Dominique in Heaven" (1991), showing a woman with a blunt bob standing pigeon-toed before a brick wall, her sparkly garment flung up over her stomach, wind blowing hair across her face. Another is "Toni in an Abandoned Building on 13th Street" (1992), in which Toni stands fully nude on a pillar inside a dilapidated structure.

The story behind the Toni image: it was February, 20-something degrees outside. "He gets totally naked and I see a pillar," Naito recalled. "I ask him to go stand over there and he's like, 'Yeah, why not?'" Naito was shooting with a Pentax 6 by 7. It was the last frame on the roll. Toni was freezing — arms crossed, looking up — yet the image reads as camp and glamour.

How did Naito develop his approach?

Naito is self-taught. He discovered August Sander's work on his 19th birthday at a Strand bookstall on Fifth Avenue and 60th Street, and Richard Avedon's "In The American West" (1979–84) the next year at a shop called A Photographer's Place in SoHo. His biggest inspiration, however, was Diane Arbus, whose photographs he looked at almost every night before bed.

"I wouldn't take a picture unless they were comfortable with me and my camera," he said. "I'm seeing them, but I'm also being seen by them."

That trust took time. In Harlem, acceptance took almost two years. Residents were not used to seeing someone of his ethnicity there, especially with a camera — some thought he was an undercover cop. He began at the Black Unicorn Cycle Club, invited in after talking with a man polishing a Harley-Davidson.

A formative influence was the Japanese journalist Ruiko Yoshida, who lived in Harlem in the 1960s and published the book "Black Is Beautiful" in 1972. Naito read it at 17 or 18. He then walked to Harlem with a backpack, a 35-millimeter camera and film, and moved there the following year.

What is Naito photographing now?

Naito lives in a small Japanese town of about 33,000 people, where he photographs foreign residents from Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Vietnam, China and India. Since returning to Japan in 2025, he has visited a Japanese-language school two or three times a week, taking candid photographs during breaks and later making composed portraits of students, most in their teens and 20s.

"I see something of my younger self in these students," he said. The new book and Chinatown exhibition now give the Meatpacking District women the wider audience Naito says this chapter of New York history deserves.