To get into the kind of club where Sharon Smith worked, in New York City during the 80s, you couldn’t just turn up in jeans and a nice top. You had to really dress. You certainly couldn’t turn up in army fatigues and a patched-up blue-jean skirt, which is what Smith had worn before becoming a “camera girl” in 1979, taking pictures of partygoers in the city’s sweatiest clubs between the hours of midnight and 4am every week. “Forget it,” she says over video call from New York.
The outfits that did get people in – shiny, madcap and electric, not a bit like the more corporate-inflected shoulder pad and pie-crust collar 80s styles currently enjoying a renaissance – are documented in all their effervescent glory in Smith’s new book, Camera Girl. It is a collection of the pictures she took on her Polaroid SX-70 throughout heady nights at the Savoy, the Red Parrot, Studio 54, Roseland Ballroom, Merlyn’s, 4D, Area, Palladium, Mars, New York, New York and especially the Ritz, an East Village club that was the centre of the new wave music scene.
The subjects, as she puts it in the book, were “dancers as they drank, drugged, flirted, and, sometimes, fell in love”. Some were global superstars, like Madonna and David Bowie; others were mere civilians, though you wouldn’t know it from their get-up.
There are leopard-print boob tubes with matching elbow-length gloves. There are men in sailor hats, budgie smugglers and red leather ties. There’s an embarrassment of sequins and pink, blue and ice-blond hair; vivid eye shadow that stretches extravagantly up to the brow; carnival looks and Catholic looks. On the cover of the book there is a shot from the waist down of someone wearing lamé gold leggings. Smith plans to wear something similar to the book launch. “It was like every night was Halloween,” says Smith, remembering two girls wearing hazmat suits.
Smith’s photos are a document of a different era, and could be seen as a timely repost. As Honey Dijon notes in the book: “Today, to get past the red rope you just have to pay, but back then you had to have a look or a vibe or a witty repartee – there had to be something about you – to pass through that door.” For some that might sound like a lot of pressure. “A little bit,” says Smith, “but it also adds this element of fun,” something she thinks “is sorely missing in our culture”. It made going out “an event,” she says.
It also sounds like a sartorial challenge for someone more used to dressing down. “For me, it was an education,” she says. “It took me a couple of months to figure out that I needed to be noticeable in some way, but not competitive with people.” Her “costume” – her word – evolved. “It ended up being a black strapless dress with fingerless black lace gloves and these high heels that I got from Barneys on sale, which I wore to death.”
Innocuous, relatively speaking, but also not nothing, Smith’s chosen look probably helped her to get the shots that she did. There’s one of Debbie Harry in a red and yellow stripey T-shirt with pink eyeshadow, and another of David Bowie delicately tucking his chin to give a profile shot. “I don’t remember a lot about that. But I did ask him and then he just gently turned his head. It wasn’t like he wanted to get away from me. It was like: ‘Oh, look at this.’” In the book she recounts her 3am encounter with Grace Jones. “When I walked up to her and raised my camera … she looked at me for a split second, slipped on her sunglasses, then smiled. The flash went off and she whispered, ‘Thanks, love,’ – then strode on to the dancefloor.”
There is a lingering sadness to the pictures, too. A record of the life-affirming creative scene in a city bubbling with talent and energy, many of the photographs capture people who would go on to die during the Aids epidemic that would soon sweep the city. “A lot of these people are no longer with us. A lot of them,” says Smith.
If the outfits in the clubs were an education to Smith, it sounds like they were also an education to people outside the scene. “People would buy a T-shirt in the basement of the Ritz about a band and they would rip it up. And then two weeks later people would be buying ripped up T-shirts from shops on Madison Avenue … The fashion that was going on there had legs.”
Smith was 28 when she walked into the Ritz and set out her stall selling quickfire portraits to partygoers for $3 a pop. Now 73 and a tai chi teacher, she thinks some of the sartorial brilliance may have been a response to the repressive politics of the day. “It was the Reagan years. New York was kind of a gritty place, and you walked into the clubs and there was this celebratory feeling and people were dressed up.”
She thinks the individuality on display then isn’t happening now. But, for better or worse, that might be about to change. “It’s not a reason to go through this horrible [time],” but if any good does come of it, she hopes “there’s another explosion of creativity”.
