Beauty, if just for a moment

Jonnie Andersen best understands things by gazing through her camera lens. She photographed her co-workers at a casino. She photographed her boss while he was firing her for photographing her co-workers.

Then Jonnie, small-town-bred and Ivy League-educated, started bartending at a saloon at the intersection of downtown’s gentrification and grit. She got to know the prostitutes who hung out there -- and felt she had to photograph them too.

They sat on barstools at the Bunkhouse next to writers and artists, trading tales over drinks. Some women were middle-aged, nearly toothless, with scarred necks and wrists and haunting stares; others were waifs fresh from the bus stop. Some were strong. Some were hustlers. They were all unlike anyone she’d ever known.

In taking their pictures for nearly two years, Jonnie found a sense of purpose in a city steeped in vice. To friends and family, the project seemed risky, even bizarre. Methamphetamine and crack had eaten away many of the women’s teeth and lucidity, and listening to their hard-knock stories wore Jonnie down.

But Jonnie, 32, came to believe that the photo sessions gave the women a welcome, if brief, escape. She offered them $20 for their time but some refused the money. They wanted only copies of their head shots, in which their tousled hair and reddened lips gave them an air of glamour. Their bruises were nearly masked with makeup.

A full moon hovers over downtown as Jonnie walks into the Western Casino. She’s wearing a brown zip-up sweater and silver earrings; a highlighted bob frames her heart-shaped face. She is jittery despite tossing back a few shots of Jagermeister: So many things could go wrong.

She and two friends scan the crowd for a curvy woman with a cocoa complexion, red lips and a dyed-blond weave. Earlier in the night, someone told them she was a prostitute and that she was headed to this casino. The woman is in the lobby. She says her name is Charlene and she’s from Omaha; she laughs when asked her age. Her eyes are glassy and her gestures wild.

“We want to take your picture,” says Jonnie’s roommate, Marissa DiNicola, 29.

“Take my picture, take my picture!” Charlene shrieks. She walks with the group to the nearby Travelers Motel, a string of salmon-colored buildings on Fremont Street where Jonnie has reserved Room 25.

It’s two days before Christmas, and Jonnie and Marissa have pieced together a kitschy holiday scene. There are boxes wrapped in red glitter paper and a gold-tinsel tree adorned with bubble lights and candy canes. The roommates affixed stockings to the window with duct tape. They wanted to bring fake snow, but their Chihuahua, Alice Cooper, urinated on it.

Charlene is handed a Santa hat and jacket; her scarf dangles out of the jacket like a tail. She shakes her hair and grabs her breasts and says, “These ain’t no fakes!” She twirls and shimmies, and everyone is laughing, even Jonnie, who’s peering through her camera.

“You guys are making fun of me for real,” Charlene says.

“We love you,” Marissa says. “We have your better interests in mind.”

Another friend, Mingo Collaso, 27, is waving a light reflector to flutter Charlene’s hair. “Oh, that is so hot,” he says. “Keep it right there. Give it to her. Wait till your kids see the pictures. They’re going to say, ‘Who’s that top model?’ ”

A buoyant Charlene plops on a faux fur rug. Jonnie hands the camera to Mingo and tries to show Charlene how to pose. Charlene crawls on top of Jonnie to perch the Santa hat on her head.

“I love it,” Jonnie says.

The session ends abruptly: Charlene stands up and says she has to go. Jonnie decides Charlene isn’t lucid enough to sign a release allowing Jonnie to use the photos in a book. Mingo escorts Charlene back to the casino, and Jonnie and Marissa duck outside to smoke.

Every time the women leave, they linger in Jonnie’s thoughts. She wonders what landed Charlene here and what drugs might be fogging her mind. Where does she sleep? In her car? Charlene repeatedly said she kept a Bible in her back seat.

“This is so hard on me,” Jonnie says.

Jonnie grew up in Superior, Neb. -- population 1,800 -- where her stepfather farmed corn and wheat and her mom worked with special education students. When Jonnie got in trouble, she had to haul hay. She dreamed of becoming a fashion designer in New York, but ended up at the University of Nebraska, and after graduation moved to Las Vegas because it was nothing like home. She worked as a waitress and bought her first nice camera with a $1,500 tip. She left to pursue a master’s degree in photography at Yale.

Three years ago, she returned to Las Vegas, where she juggled several part-time jobs, including tending bar and taking photos at Glamour Shots. Her clients mainly wanted head shots for online dating services or pictures to give to soldiers heading overseas.

“I kept thinking there was a project I had to finish here,” Jonnie says, “but I didn’t know what it was.”

Jonnie told her mother, Pat Gunn, about all the Bunkhouse characters, including an impoverished military veteran she sometimes took shopping. But she mentioned the prostitutes so often that Pat recalls saying: “Well, maybe you should take pictures of those ladies of the night. That’s what Vegas is all about.”

Jonnie spent months trying to persuade women in micro-minis to pose for her. They thought she was a cop. She paid a barfly $100 to win them over. He had lived downtown for so long that the prostitutes trusted him when he suggested they model for Jonnie.

The first shoot came together two years ago. It was summer and unbearably hot. Jonnie was so nervous that she decided to adopt a persona -- in her mind, she was playing Dolly Parton. “I thought: Everyone likes Dolly Parton.”

Three women -- Miesha, Ruby and Peaches -- met Jonnie at the Travelers. Miesha’s neck and wrists were scarred and she had stretch marks on her breasts. Had she been overweight? Pregnant? Jonnie didn’t pry. She didn’t ask for ages or real names, though many readily shared them. Jonnie wanted the prostitutes to feel at ease. She wanted them to sit taller and smile more broadly, so a friend gave them makeovers as if they were Glamour Shots clients.

“Why not shoot them the way they are?” her mother remembers asking. “To me, that’s more of a statement than dressing them up and making them look nice.” Jonnie said she wanted them to feel good about themselves.

Her friend rouged the prostitutes’ cheeks and helped them choose dresses; all were drawn to a $600 strapless wedding gown from Jonnie’s broken engagement. They rushed into the parking lot to show their pimps how nice they looked. But they also kept asking whether Jonnie was done -- they had to get back to work.

“By the end, we were so heartbroken and depressed,” Jonnie says. “We took them out of their lives for a few minutes, and they were so happy. I couldn’t imagine these women living in crack houses.”

For a time, Jonnie had considered making greeting cards with the photos. But she was reminded of a Yale classmate’s project. He had interspersed pictures of people who lived in a slum with pictures of garbage cans. His message was clear: His subjects were trash.

“I thought, I can’t do that,” Jonnie says. “They can’t be an art project. This can’t be ironic.”

Jonnie directed 10 or so shoots -- photographing about a dozen prostitutes -- and after each session, she grew more worried. The drugs were destroying the women. Jonnie was sitting at a Denny’s one night when she saw a prostitute rifling through garbage cans, so high that she barely resembled her pictures.

Diana pained Jonnie most. Many of the women refused to admit they were prostitutes -- saying instead they were housekeepers -- but Diana, a dark-haired dynamo, owned up to her job and bragged that she was good at it. She dropped by the Bunkhouse so often that a bartender accused her of trying to score drugs. She came over to Jonnie’s condo, made macaroni and cheese, took bubble baths, watched reruns of “Yes, Dear,” and, Jonnie says, giggled in her sleep.

“Is it fate?” Jonnie wrote one day in an e-mail. “Have they consciously placed themselves here? And is it my place to try to remove a few of them from a place that my simple Midwestern mind sees as the ultimate badness?

“Can pictures make a difference? Can I make a difference? Can I help them get off this street, get out of meth/crack use? I just don’t know.”

That December night, after the session with Charlene, Jonnie hears from a Bunkhouse bartender. He’s sending over two women, who introduce themselves as Robin Barry and Sarah Murphy.

Sarah, 48, is inhaling an off-brand cigarette and sipping a plastic cup of something. She wears a pink sweater and a brown leather jacket she says she dug out of a dumpster. She has pink fingernails and few teeth. She had professional pictures taken decades ago, she says, but they were stolen from her storage shed. So were more than 40 of her paintings.

“My stuff is so cool. You can turn it four different directions and see four different pictures,” she says.

Jonnie’s camera is clicking.

“It’s a gift that was given to me,” Sarah says. “I am an artist. It’s a passion. You get drunk or high and look at it for 10 minutes or an hour and be like, ‘Wow.’ ”

She sits down, hops up and starts pacing.

“God will protect you,” she tells Mingo. “He’s there always. Just be good. You can always be good.”

“That’s deep,” Mingo says.

“I’m gifted,” Sarah says.

Robin, 50, ducks into the changing room, where Marissa is in charge of a 14-ounce can of Aqua Net hair spray, three shades of EverFresh foundation and a lipstick called Cherry Rain. Robin -- soft-spoken and rail-thin with sharp cheekbones and kind eyes -- emerges in a dress and thigh-high stockings that sag at the knees.

“What are you doing later?” Sarah teases, hugging her.

Robin stands in front of the tinsel tree. She asks to see the pictures Jonnie is taking. “It doesn’t even look like me,” she says, her eyes widening and her mouth cracking into a smile.

Robin then sits on the floor, and Mingo waves the light reflector, flapping Robin’s brown wig and thin bangs. Her body language changes noticeably: She straightens her back, lifts her chin and slightly closes her eyes. She is still grinning.

Jonnie finishes, and Robin leaves. Marissa and Sarah are in the changing room. Their banter resembles that of girls at a slumber party -- talk of makeup and guys, punctuated with giggles.

Marissa is trying to apply eyeliner. Sarah instinctively jerks away.

“My beauty queen,” Marissa coos, trying to calm her.

“You’re so happy with yourself; I hope you spread that,” Sarah says.

Marissa coaxes Sarah’s ash-blond wig into a bouffant, and Sarah changes into a strapless, sea-foam-colored dress. Her right shoulder is pocked with scars, and her knees are bruised. Jonnie directs Sarah to a purple velour chair, and Sarah -- eager to have her picture taken -- responds like an excited child. She kicks her legs and stomps her feet and snickers throughout the session.

She finally quiets down, and tells Jonnie and Marissa: “Thank you for making me so pretty.”

Jonnie recently left Las Vegas. It’s for a number of reasons, she says: She’s too old for bartending; she’s lived here too long. Her mother begged her to get out; friends warned the city would “eat her soul.” She and Marissa picked Austin, Texas. Maybe Jonnie could teach photography there.

She’s less naive than at the project’s inception, she says, and far more heartbroken: There was little she could do about the prostitutes’ addictions. “When I’m gone,” Jonnie wrote in an e-mail, “they may not have anyone to view them as the wonderful, amazing and beautiful people that they are.”

Before moving, Jonnie chose more than a dozen portraits for a slender, hardcover book dedicated to Diana; it sold a handful of copies on a self-publishing website. The women in “The Little Chapel of Esoteric Cosmetology” stare out from behind a pink-feathered fan, from atop a leopard-print sheet, from under a shower of bean bag stuffing that resembles snow. A local arts writer described the prostitutes as radiating “joy, dignity, sensuality and strength.” Their eyes are mesmerizing.

“Diana said it should be called ‘The Women of Fremont Street.’ But the thing is,” Jonnie says, “we’re all trying to figure out who we are by doing this.”

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ashley.powers@latimes.com