from an intro to a book of club photographs
"My most vivid recollections of a
decade-plus raving and clubbing are in fact mostly visual ones. The sonic and
pharmacological peak points tend to blur together amorphously; what stands out
in the memory are images. Tableaus of frenzy; interactions with out-of-it
strangers; dancers on the other side of the room whose fluid frenzy fascinated
my gaze; a shared glance of loved-up complicity;
scenes of squalor and moments of grace; the chambers, passages, and internal
architecture of the clubs themselves. I remember the toilets and the chill out
zones as much as the dancefloors. While
they work through immersive sonic overload, clubs also function as milieu-machines, designed
for the circulation of bodies, generating both random encounters with individuals
and a transitory but real communion with everybody in the place.
When I look at these photographs, it
all feels at once absolutely familiar and freshly foreign. I know these
faces. If you spent any time clubbing and raving in the ‘90s or 2000s, you will
recognize the expressions, the shapes thrown, the furtive exchanges (a pill
discreetly dropped into a palm). To
stare into these pictures is to be immersed again in the maelstrom of madness. Snarls of euphoria. Roars of joy. Faces scrunched in bliss. Pilled-to-the-gills
rictus smiles. Pursed lips, droopy lids, melted grins. Teeth crackling in the
UV. The jutting tongue, universal symbol
of insolent lasciviousness, at once taunting and a kind of intransitive come-on
to everyone and no one. Boys with hard-earned hard bodies: shirts off, boxer
short waistbands proclaiming allegiance to the houses of Calvin Klein or Pierre
Cardin, ribs like xylophones, armpit hair matted and coiled with moisture. Girls,
celebrating their own sass, taut bellies beaded with perspiration, often in that
classic posture where it looks like she’s delectating her own underarm aroma. Faces
flushed pink, or filmed with sweat that sheens where the light catches. Brightly
bronzered or sallow in the glare, a pallor like the belly of a dead fish.
As well as the faces and the contortions,
the clothes are also familiar: a riot of man-made fabrics and inorganic colors
chosen to converge at the intersection of futurity and psychedelic. Red latex
batty riders, virulently artificial hues of hair, extensions as lurid as electrical
wires braided into Medusa tendrils. Fluoro streaks across faces and arms. Equally
plasticky and synthetic are the toys and accoutrements: plushies, gloves, glowsticks.
Here, again, in these pictures the
aging raver will find a familiar bestiary of the chemically depraved: the gurners,
the gargoyles, the drug-gobbling goblins. And then that sudden shock of the
raver who’s dramatically older than the rest of the crowd, but going for it just
as hard as the kids around them, who could be their daughter or their nephew,
or even, occasionally, their grandchild.
But also, amid the commotion and
celebration, there are the captured moments of stillness, privacy, loneliness, exhaustion,
dejection. Intimations of the coming comedown, the return to socially atomized mundanity.
A spy in the house of the loved-up, the camera here eternalizes the ephemeral: moments almost certainly unremembered by the people
swept up in them. The pictures remind me
often of the way a strobe freeze-frames a dancefloor tableau, plucking fugitive
patterns out of the kinetic flow. But some also recall that harsh cut-off point
when the lights come up, exposing the night’s survivors: those still standing,
still twitching at the end of a party, not ready to go home. That brutal artificial dawn that
reveals also the human wreckage: figures slumped where the floor meets the
wall, surrounded by the jetsam of excess: splintered plastic glasses, crushed cigarette packets (this is the era
before the 2007 smoking ban, remember), crushed cans of Red Bull, Pils bottles and
sticky streaks of spilled lager.
Like Mark Leckey’s found-footage artwork
Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, there is something tenderly intrusive about
the camera’s gaze here. This roving eye takes in with equanimity the supercool
stylist, the nutty mentalist, and the abjectly out-of-it. There is an
oscillation between verité realness (clubbers caught unawares, in the throes)
and theatricality (poseurs predisposed to be looked at, acting out their freedom
from constraint as if already for the benefit of the photographer and posterity).
In these pictures, we see people losing themselves and finding themselves. In
these public but intimate spaces, private fantasies are enacted and secret
selves revealed - often a side that
can’t be expressed within the strictures of routine existence, the
wild-and-crazy true-you unknown to co-workers or family. Here uncaged is the
dream self that appears only under cover of night. Clubland itself is a form of
collective dreaming, taking place when everybody else is in bed having their
own rapid-eye-movement adventures. “We
dream as we live - alone”, the saying
goes. But rave is the opposite: a dreamworld built together. "
