Jessica Craig-Martin has been taking her distinctive, definitive party pictures for the New Yorker and Vanity Fair and Vogue for three decades. She took this one at a Frieze magazine party at the old MI5 building in London in the early 1990s. Some photographers, she has suggested, have been interested in capturing where gold is mined; she focuses her lens on the places – the gala balls, the extravagant gallery openings, the fashion launches – where it ends up. She is not interested in faces so much as flesh; her eye is drawn to tragi-comic detail. In this picture, part of her Standard Excess series, the mystery is simple, she says: “Where is the other leg?”
Experience has taught her short cuts to the essence of an event. “I check to see what the salmon is wearing,” she told me last week. “You can tell a lot about a party from the sartorial choices of the fish.” Other than that, it is always shoes. “This is why yacht parties are so hard to photograph,” she says, “apart from the fact they are mostly hideous. I have a theory that the same person who has made sneakers so ugly has also been designing the yachts.”
Craig-Martin tends to work on that frontline between every party’s warring factions: anticipation and reality. “I like,” she says, “to locate the moment when both desire and disappointment are tangible. That creates drama in the photograph. No one wants to see a picture of a well-balanced person having a reasonable night out.” New year exacerbates those tensions, happily. “There is a heightened sense of time passing, which gives the night an apocalyptic edge. Then there is enormous pressure to reform and renew; to miraculously manifest a better self overnight. It’s a perfect recipe for emotional devastation.”
