Clubland

There is no stage in a club, which is the whole point. The booth is at head height or below it, the DJ is a silhouette against whatever the lighting rig leaks, and the only face lit properly all night is the one looking down at the mixer. Everything else is the floor, and the floor is the subject.

These frames are from four years of Melbourne nights, with a few from further afield, and most of them were made in rooms where a camera is not especially welcome. Basements and back rooms, a warehouse with the roller door down, a bar at the hour when the lights have gone red and nobody is leaving. I keep the camera small and the lens short and I do not use flash, ever, so what the sensor gets is what the room gave: a pool of amber on a crowd with its hands up, a strip of neon on a brick wall, the gold scatter off a ceiling of disco balls, a DJ's hand coming up to block the lens because the moment was his and not mine. Grain and blur are not a problem. They are the texture of the place.

What interests me is the hour when the booth and the floor stop being two different things. Early on there is a line between them, the DJ working and the room deciding. Then something lands, and the line goes. A woman with a drink raised and her eyes closed. A man in a football shirt dancing on his own in the red, entirely happy. Three figures on a podium in a room the colour of a sodium lamp. The shadow of someone on a wall by the door, fixing their hair before they go back in. A DJ reaching across the decks to shake the hand of a dancer who has been in front of him for two hours. None of that is performance. It is just what people look like when a room is working, and it does not photograph from the back.

So I stand on the floor. Not in the booth, where the view is of the backs of heads, and not at the edges, where the picture is of other people's night. In it, close, for as long as the night lasts, with the camera at chest height and the shutter open longer than is sensible. Some of these are a quarter of a second long. The people in them had no idea, and that is the only way they could have been made.

This is an ongoing body of work and it gathers, with the club and festival DJs from elsewhere on the site, on the Clubland theme page. Melbourne, mostly, 2022 to 2026, shot on my own account and sometimes for the clubs and promoters who let me in.