Everyone's a Photographer

And no one's throwing parties.

Parties have been the topic that’s lingered in my search bar this week. For a lot of reasons but particularly their appeal in the visual sense and also the sacred event that is a party. Parties to me can be literal parties but also the idea of nightlife, youth, and chaos. I have very loose definitions of party images, mostly because a party is often an event, it has before and afters. It is not just the house where the music is, it’s where the people are.

There was a rumor at the start of fall that house parties were back which I was very excited about. It made me think of the first time I ever thought about visually capturing that aspect of fun in my life. How my friends and I would all gather in one place and we’d get ready together, taking pictures on small shitty digital cameras the whole time. How the entire event would be documented, leaving nothing to the imagination. Then promptly the next morning the photos would be uploaded to Facebook and people would actually sift through each image. In some ways we gave everything, but it wasn’t curated. Social media hadn’t gotten to that point yet. I rarely remember deleting photos. That aesthetic, the harsh white flash, the low res, and the unedited look have such a hold on me. Not because it’s good, it just has a very specific nostalgic feeling. Posting it all to Facebook never really seemed like a way to get likes or anything. What it really felt like, was a way to process, store, and remember. It was some of the first times I remember wanting to capture every little detail. I wasn’t a big party person in high school but every event was an event, which was enough reason to take a camera. When I think of this style of photography I think of the infamous Cobrasnake.

By Mark Hunter

Mark Hunter, better known as The Cobrasnake captured the Y2K transitional era that I think is pretty iconic. I won’t get into my gripes with Cobrasnake but talking about party visuals, it seems pretty stupid to leave him out. What is so interesting to me is that the visuals he captured became more than just this inside look at parties of the rising youth. At the time many people photographed weren’t quite famous but were somewhere in between. I am captivated by the documentation of the subculture-turned-pop-culture that defined the early aughts. When looking at his work it has a Facebook/Myspace feel in the best way possible. This is not a statement that I use to simplify the process but to define the style which took hold of the photographic period. In comparison to how people photograph now, the lack of filter, a lack of refinement becomes overwhelming to me.

It’s not that Hunter didn’t make decisions or edit, but that the subjects were so excited to be photographed, their image, or what is now slanged as their “brand,” took the back burner. Now that everything feels curated, his photography has always felt like that last trace of a sort of indifference. Where the subjects were having fun and felt famous just by being seen. The photographs themselves feel familiar for many reasons. What we see is Katy Perry, Alexa Chung, and Jeremey Scott, yet it feels like photographs plucked from our own albums. It’s like seeing photos of friends, but viewing them now we see the people who would rise to Instagram and pop culture stardom. They had to be interesting in order to be seen, they are in a league of their own. Yet in these photographs, they were more like “us” than they have ever been in the past decade. Put their photographs in our own albums and watch them blend in. Seeing this work evokes a specific sort of memory. We think of Tumblr, American Apparel, and indie sleaze. The party scenes and photographs become so great because they are not timeless. We remember it, we know it, we lived it. I was in High School at the time but it was all the same. The more I write the more parties I remember. Hunter’s massive archive and the starkness of each image make for a portfolio of what appears to be an endless party. He captured the essence of life at the time, of being young and undone and how cool it felt to be a mess. The chaos of a party situated itself right at his lens, and all he had to do was take the photo.

This style of party photography relies on the feeling of partying. In the same way Project X capitalized off that era of welcomed chaos and mess, the photographs of house parties and DJs gave into the desire to let loose. I love that these images capture the sloppiness of a party, the undone nature of the time. It all evokes, again, a certain feeling. The Steve Aoki Pursuit of Happiness remix, I am certain, could get a room going even now. There are photographers now that also photograph the party scene like Myles Hendrik. Though in some ways I am less inclined to be so drawn to these photos. Although they are incredibly aesthetically pleasing, I sometimes think they rely on the celebrity factor. Not to mention there is that self-image factor. Again it’s not that people didn’t care in the Cobrasnake era but it was different. It also wasn’t as instant, and the reach was never as far. New insider party photography feels like a majority of the subjects take themselves a little too seriously, play to the camera, and provide the wow factor to look edgy. It doesn’t hit the same. I am less drawn to the inside look of celebrity culture because of how disenchanting it is to see privileged people perform for the camera. Cobrasnake and the Y2K house party visuals have always felt more honest. Maybe a bit of knowledge now, of where photography and life would go makes me more inclined to enjoy the ugly and the honest.

By Nan Goldin

Taking photos of partying can also be a byproduct of documenting life, especially youth. A lot of photographers that I really admire weren’t set out on documenting just the party. Their photographs gave an intimate portrait of life. Nan Goldin’s famed The Ballad of Sexual Dependency was a sort of diary of her experience. It documented and captured her life from 1979-1986. The project became a way for Goldin to remember everything, every detail and that means it also captured addiction, loss, and the AIDs epidemic. With this context what she captured in that time becomes even more intimate. Here are people that are lost or suffering or grieving and even if they are in love there is also pain here. Her party scenes become anxiety inducing. Watching this slideshow in person, in the audience, there is a heaviness that is thick in the air. With everything we know in the present we can only guess how much worse it will be. It’s a party gone bad, or a party that has not allowed us to forget about the problems that face us come morning.

By Ryan McGinley

Ryan McGinley’s The Kids Are Alright is another project I think of frequently. Like Goldin, McGinley has stated that he had an obsessive need to document his life. This idea doesn’t feel new now because that’s all we have known for over a decade. I have always known what it’s like to document every little thing from an artistic standpoint. I still document the majority of my life and have a real interest in the idea of memories. Only now it’s more common to share these things through stories, TikTok, and Instagram. But in those hazy years before it became the thing to do, it would, for some, be a revolutionary idea. To put into perspective, McGinley would first self-publish these images in 1999 a year after he began making photographs. He would continue to make this work in the years after the initial publishing. The Whitney would honor him with a solo exhibition 4 years later in 2003, the same year MySpace was founded. Facebook would accumulate 1 million users by the end of 2004. The Real Housewives wouldn’t begin until March 21st, 2006. The Kardashians who have become revolutionary in changing social media, wouldn’t have a show until 2007. That same year, the first iPhone would hit the market forever changing the way we viewed art, photography, and each other. It’s not that no one had done it before but the photos he made reflect what I think social media would become.

I have always been drawn to McGinley’s work because of the level of intimacy he brings to each image even within his debaucherous lifestyle. I somehow always find myself feeling like I’m there. Right in the thick of it, just out of frame. What sets this project apart is the tenderness to his images, no matter what is going on. All of them feel candid, raw, and a little bit wild. It has that feeling of youth, that nothing else matters, that we need to remember all of this. This body of work has to me, always felt to be the perfect visual representation of youth. That feeling of invincibility, recklessness, coasting on the facade that this state of life would always last. The people partying all night would still be there years from now. It seems true too, like McGinley could party every night for the rest of his life. That he is still out there making work with the same people. When I see these images I find myself entranced by the idea of always being that young and free, I think youth has a way of making everything feel everlasting. The success of the project is well deserved. It makes you want to jump right into danger. Grab 20 rolls of film and find yourself on the lower east side ready to capture the long night ahead.

Now at 25, I no longer have a shitty digital camera but a small hunk of junk that I won in 2019. It has become my lifeline to remembering. I am not a McGinley or a Goldin, or even a Hunter when it comes to party visuals. To me what makes their work party-like is their ability to capture feelings in chaotic settings. How they managed to get to the core of it all. How the party became the setting, not the subject. Party visuals are interesting because at first glance they are simply just scenes of people drunk or dancing or kissing but it’s really about the larger idea. How these scenes shape what it meant to be there. I still think a lot of my work surrounds the idea of partying. I feel that sense of need to have it all down somewhere. I blind my friends in bars across Manhattan because it’s my way of saying I love you. My need to capture everything is a fault, but sooner or later it should polish into a virtue. I love knowing I have proof of every small bit of time I had with my closest friends. I am hyper-aware of the ticking clock that pulls my them farther away from me. Soon there are families, spouses, and children to be counted for. My friends are women with goals and dreams and in some ways the more I photograph them the more I realize this is a sort of goodbye to them. It’s not that we will never see each other again, just that by the end it will be different, we will be different. I am saying goodbye cheerfully because there’s just a different version of them on the other side of this project. I want them to prosper, to dream, to love, to grow up. My own party photos remain the proof that we were here together. That no matter how old we get, even though we are women apart, when we’re together we are girls. I won’t place my work on the same level as the other photographers. But that’s never been the point anyways.

Now everyone’s a photographer and everyone’s posting party photos. However, why we photograph now is really the question we have to answer. I am unsure how that has changed with social media, it might take a little more digging. Photography is like any fashion trend ever. People on social media do the next big thing, to have the chicest feed. It’s all real bullshit. The people who are doing social media by the social media rulebook are no enemy of mine, I just am not particularly interested in them. I am more interested in the people who feel so compelled to capture things it will kill them if they don’t. The people whose feeds represent a visual diary. It’s not about not being curated, but what you desire in posting. For artists, I think what draws them to the party scene is how exciting it is and how honest and open people will be. This is what it means to be young. Upon a few nights out you start to see an artist’s perspective. How the party scene is refined to what they are called to, something like intuition and style. That’s something no content creator will have and that’s okay. Everyone’s a photographer, but not everyone’s an artist.