On one day each year, the Festival Theater, a strip club in Chicago, opened its doors to men who had paid the cover charge and let them bring cameras inside. They were free to aim wherever they liked. Michael L. Abramson made his photographs there between 1978 and 1980, but he was not making the pictures those customers were making. He turned his lens on the photographers themselves: men at tables, flash units lifted, faces fixed on the stage.

That shift of position is the book’s engine. Standing back, Abramson kept his distance from the transaction on stage while leaving it plainly visible; the club and its customs stay in the frame, disclosed through the behaviour of the people watching. The result is less an exposé than a study of looking as a social act — who pays, who directs, who is directed at. The title states the arrangement plainly, and the pictures hold to it.

Hoxton Mini Press issued the series as a 96-page paperback in 2017, in a small format of roughly 17 by 12 centimetres. The scale matters. These are dense, close-quarters photographs, and the modest trim keeps them at the distance of a reader rather than a gallery wall; the sequence accumulates instead of announcing itself.

For a collector, the argument for the book is structural rather than promotional. It takes a specific Chicago ritual of the late 1970s — one night a year, cameras admitted — and uses it to examine the conventions of spectatorship that photography has so often served and seldom questioned. The conceit is exact, the period detail is of its moment, and the questions it raises about the gaze have only become more central since. It sits naturally with other photobooks that use a narrow premise to open a wide subject.