POPPY PRAY
Poppy Pray, known as the Whoretographer, has been documenting sex workers’ lives since moving to London in 2020, working across strip clubs, dungeons, brothels, hospitals, and domestic spaces. Their practice emerges from experiences of stigma and erasure and is rooted in collaboration, solidarity, and care. Through photography, Pray advocates for sex workers’ labour rights and full decriminalisation, while exploring gendered expression and contradiction under capitalism. Working closely with sex worker communities in East London, their work centres lived experience, intimacy, and self-determination. In a climate of censorship, their lens functions as both archive and resistance, reframing photography as advocacy and a means of reshaping how we see and are seen.
Iconography, 2025, C-type Print accompanied by hand-stitched satin, wood, steel.
Made in collaboration with Ace Nova and Mz Cherry
The Church of England and sex work share a long and entangled history, stretching back to Roman Britain. The Church’s rituals, vestments, adopted names, and its simultaneous insistence on concealment and spectacle closely mirror those of the oldest profession. In medieval Southwark, the Bishop of Winchester oversaw and profited from licensed brothels established under the order of Henry II. The women who worked there, known as the Winchester Geese, funded many of London’s churches, despite their names and lives being erased from the historical record.
In this image, Ace splays their legs, their identity obscured by a silk scarf. Bible pages, playing cards, and roses surround their Pleaser-adorned feet as stained-glass light illuminates their body. Lit candles along abandoned pews honour the Winchester Geese, echoing the anonymity imposed on those who came before. The surrounding objects reference the moral contradictions of the twelfth century, when sex workers were simultaneously relied upon and condemned. Reclaiming their bodies, labour, and tools as worthy of reverence, the work raises sex workers to a long-denied space of iconography and divinity.
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All works in this exhibition are available to purchase. To find out more, please email: loveforsale.exhibit@gmail.com