STUDIO 54
Bianca Jagger rode a white horse through it on her birthday; the owners gave Andy Warhol a bin full of dollars for his: New York’s Studio 54 opened in 1977 and closed less than three years later, but it’s remembered as the most glamorous, most louche, the best nightclub in history. It was also one of the most photographed because, populated by celebrities and partypeople, and decorated with literally tonnes of glitter and an illuminated, coke-snorting man-on-the-moon, it was a treasure trove for image-makers. Tod Papageorge was one of them, first arriving at a New Year’s party in 1977 -78 and going back again and again until it closed. But while most of the photographers there were on assignment, or shooting celebrities with a view to selling on the images, he was working for himself, free to capture the scene on his own terms. “I was on my own kind of self-assignment, of course, but it had nothing to do with celebrity, and all to do with making what I hoped would be ‘clear photographs’,” he says. “By which I meant pictures that were legible and complete, although drawn from a visually complex situation.” Because of this, and inspired by Brassai’s images of 1930s Parisian nightlife, Papageorge was shooting on a 6×9 Fujica rather than the lightweight 35mm Leicas favoured by many others. With “the feel of a lead brick in my hand” and “a gruesomely inaccurate viewfinder”, this beast was hard to shoot with but, says Papageorge, it allowed him to create more detailed and richly toned images. Capturing about 1500 images over five or six visits, he showed half a dozen in the ’80s – “a couple of which have become iconic”. “This is what the times, at least in New York, favoured,” he says. “Editing a few ‘winners’ out of a larger group,
Studio 54, by Tod Papageorge, is published by Stanley/Barker, priced £40 for the standard edition or £300 for a boxset special edition, including a signed, limited edition print.
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then printing and, hopefully, exhibiting them with the object of selling one or two to MoMA or a collector.” The rest languished undiscovered – some negatives never even printed – until Papageorge’s German gallerist, Thomas Zander, asked him to send over some archival work about a year-and-a-half ago. Papageorge included a couple of Studio 54 JPEGs in the mix and, intrigued, Zander asked to see the rest. He produced scans of over a hundred more and Zander ended up showing a large grid of 39 at Paris Photo in 2013, where they caught the eye of UK publishers Gregory and Rachel Barker. “Rachel and I had been looking for another project… to publish for nearly three years after the Scot Sothern book [Lowlife], so when we got back to London, we emailed Tod. Fortunately, he was looking for a publisher,” says Barker. Barker and Papageorge picked out 66 of the best images and Barker sequenced them to follow a typical night out, showing New York’s beau monde arriving, in the heat of the night, and falling asleep (or passing out) towards the end. The book is structured around three templates – doublepage spreads, right-hand verticles and smaller horizontals appearing as pairs on the two facing pages – and was lushly printed by EBS in Verona. The result is compelling and beautiful, and even Papageorge is impressed. “As a group, they’re much better than I’d first understood,” he says. “I’d rejected [some of] those pictures back then as not being good enough for even a proof print. A good argument for either never destroying a single one of your negatives, or for concluding that I should never be trusted to edit my own pictures.”