Night Chicas is an anthropological tour through a damaged landscape of various Guatemalan prostitutes. Photographer Hans Neleman travels over the bodies of these women conscious that their stories are best unearthed through the vessels of their trade. Neleman captures the sober awareness that resonates wearily, and sometimes proudly, that the women are marked, but not defined by their bodies. Complex in its aesthetic sociological intention, the photographs inhabit a doubleness on virtually every page. An environment of poverty is visually enhanced by the camera's facility for representing the unalloyed beauty of the women, while using the settings as painterly backdrops that accentuate their somber existence. Neleman restores the human worth, and even allure of the different women, who vary in age, physical type, and degrees of attractiveness, by centering his vision on his specific response to each prostitute. He offers disclosures of their motherhood, physical decline, pervasive sadness, withered expectations, class entrapment, and dignity. The women also exhibit a creative receptivity to being photographed, permitting Neleman to focus on their physical attributes, and zones of intimacy, as if they were figures in a low budget pageant, filmed by a sophisticated artist passionate in his endeavor to document and flatter their bodies, regardless of whether they are beautiful or not. An older prostitute, her hair dyed blonde in the burnished signature common to Latin women, sports a striped knit dress, raising the skirt to expose similarly striped panties, to display an unexpected fashion sense. Zaftig, corpulent women dolled up in transparent teddies, their bellies stretching out their panties, assume the ageless poses enacted by pinups, actresses, dancers, and whores since the inception of art. A legacy of depiction courses through the poses that the women inhabit; whether cavorting among friends, sitting in grave isolation, or lying about salon-style to reference both painting and early photography, Neleman occupies the gap between documentary conception and rigorously staged portraiture. Complicated in its romantic sentiment, the photographer withholds pity to pursue a rare kind of compassionate eroticism. Neleman reveres these women, and in lieu of their lives, constructs a charged but safe occasion for collaboration, confession, and exposure.

— George Pitts, Vibe Magazine

Neleman's pictures remind us that sex workers are not just victims, to be pitied or exploited, but individuals each with their own story. Every photograph is a study of personality, of how sensuality and raw strength survive even in the most hardscrabble lives. At a time when the sex industry, and sexual slavery and trafficking, is exploding in a stream of cold statistics across the world, his humanizing approach is to be applauded.

— Alex Perry, South Asia Bureau Chief, Time Magazine