Hedonistic photos of club nights around the world in the 90s and 00s

Back in 1997, Jason Man­ning start­ed pho­tograph­ing live­ly events like gay pride on Clapham Com­mon in South Lon­don. ​“It was com­prised of peo­ple of all sorts and I think I was quite moved by the inclu­siv­i­ty of it all,” he remem­bers. ​“Lon­don was, to a greater or less­er extent, like a nev­er-end­ing par­ty. There was always some­thing to attend.”

Inspired by the work of lumi­nar­ies like Gar­ry Wino­grand and Lar­ry Fink, Man­ning start­ed build­ing a port­fo­lio to secure work as a pho­to­jour­nal­ist. As fate would have it, his friends had just launched the ​“post-drug cul­ture” mag­a­zine and style bible Sleazena­tion, and need­ed a nightlife pho­tog­ra­ph­er to take their club list­ings sec­tion to the next level.

“We didn’t want to be Mix­mag, we want­ed to be Nation­al Geo­graph­ic,” said Tris­tan ​“Stan Fontan” Dell­away, Sleazena­tion​’s first art direc­tor. ​“We want­ed to do club pho­tog­ra­phy like it was war photography.”

Man­ning was just the man for the job. Over a ten-year peri­od, he trav­eled the globe chron­i­cling inti­mate scenes of intox­i­ca­tion, plea­sure and release at a time when many clubs main­tained a strict ​“no pho­tos” policy. 

“I would often be the only per­son in the place with a cam­era,” Man­ning says. ​“Most peo­ple were fine about being shot but not always and that was okay with me. I was look­ing for rar­i­fied moments and that informed the choic­es I made. Some­times the most inter­est­ing peo­ple or sit­u­a­tions were also the most dif­fi­cult to nego­ti­ate. In those sit­u­a­tions, the urgent need to get the shot ulti­mate­ly dri­ves the whole thing and I think most peo­ple respect­ed my motivations.”

With the open­ing of his new exhi­bi­tion Night by Night at Leben­son Gallery in Paris on April 28^th, Man­ning revis­it­ed this sem­i­nal era of club cul­ture in over 20 cities around the world at the turn of the mil­len­ni­um. From Ibiza to Helsin­ki, Moscow to Seoul, Man­ning chron­i­cled scenes of hedo­nis­tic bliss and escape, craft­ing an exquis­ite archive of nightlife his­to­ry that only becomes more res­o­nant with the pas­sage of time.

“The clubs I fre­quent­ed offered a kind of refuge from the rav­ages and mun­dan­i­ty of every­day life,” Man­ning recalls. ​“I saw them as fic­tion­al spaces with a colour­ful cast of char­ac­ters that by and large wel­comed all com­ers. There was def­i­nite­ly a sense that ​‘any­thing goes’ which was indica­tive of the inclu­siv­i­ty that was cel­e­brat­ed in these places.”

To cap­ture the ener­gy of the scene, Man­ning stayed late, tak­ing it all in, not mak­ing any pic­tures until the night was at its peak. ​“Put sim­ply, when peo­ple attain a cer­tain lev­el of ine­bri­a­tion, they tend to make bet­ter sub­jects,” he says. ​“I also found that if I attained a cer­tain lev­el of ine­bri­a­tion then the whole exer­cise took on a kind of flu­id­i­ty, a choreography.”

After redis­cov­er­ing these images in 2020, Man­ning recon­nect­ed with a for­got­ten chap­ter of his past. ​“Remem­ber­ing things hav­ing been prompt­ed by a pho­to­graph is a ten­der way of rem­i­nisc­ing and some of the result­ing evo­ca­tions have been strange­ly detailed,” he says. ​“It’s been quite a mys­te­ri­ous process. Some­times it’s like look­ing at some­one else’s work.”

All pho­tos by Jason Man­ning, cour­tesy of GALLERY46 and NIGHT­BYNIGHT Agency.

Jason Man­ning: Night by Night will be on view April 28 – May 14, 2023 at Leben­son Gallery in Paris.

Enjoyed this arti­cle? Like Huck on Face­book or fol­low us on Twit­ter.