trawling through the archive
Hiyah. How’s you? Very good I hope, let me Welcome you back to another scurrilous missive from the sbh.
This week I’ve mainly been going through the CD archive* and one has stumbled across this image…
Image here
Can I say? What. An. Image.
It dates from 2002-07-28 02:58:57
It was taken on my very first digital camera which was a step down from the film stock and approach I was previous, shame I didn’t really see that at the time but this, this image really caught my attention…
I love its energy, I mean I really love it, you may not see that totally as I’ve had to protect the identity of the person in it as I don’t want to cause any embarrassment or animosity by revealing full identities, but I think you can sense it from the body language the happiness and joy within, even with the pixelation you can see the smile can’t you? (can you or am I talking shite?)
Brief description of the image, set in a nightclub in the north of england in the early 200’s the person is looking at camera, they have a plastic water bottle in between their teeth, teeth are perfect by the way, and they are smiling a smile that can be described in many ways… they are slightly backlit by the club lights (possible a strobe but it has a blue tinge to it) but it is balanced by fill in flash to light up the face and expression, although that expression looks like it lights up many places.
To the file it’s simply called Exodus19, of which I have no immediate recollection of the night, location or anything, bit of research+looking at the other images I originally thought it was the Music Box but on closer inspection of the other images it appears to be from Sub 101 which is the basement of Cruz 101, which if memory serves me correct was the afterhours night 2/3am till 9am Sunday mornings, it was possibly in the upstairs as well but again my memory is a little shakey. I think these were quite mixed nights where people went if they wanted to dance off the previous clubnight or if they were club workers who wanted to dance after shift, it was a very mixed place with a great atmosphere, fantasia lighting and bangin music.
Sidenotes here that while looking through the image I spot in this set I’ve got a flashing image, this time of someone flashing their breasts, being downright encouraged here l believe. Think I’ve talked about it before here, I do really think it deserves its own long story blog but that was quite a time, woman had somehow been encouraged to flash photographers and they often did…I have a whole set of images of these which could possibly make up a thing, publication etc but I’ll save that for when I’m gone.
I will give a bit of background in terms of how I timed my club pictures, was who I was working and what I was trying to capture/show/do. I always used to get early to clubs at this time as I was almost completely sober so no pre drinks for me so I was hanging around a lot from 8/9/10 so I’d get in early, this was partly to capture people while they were still fresh (ish) as no one really wanted people completely trollied (although later in my career that request did sometimes make itself known by certain editors but I often ignored it and said I couldn’t find any) but this one from an afterhours so therefore started at 3, it was a difficult one but it looks like I got there right at the start and made this. The publications I worked varied so some wanted either something indescribable at the time they asked, but they somehow knew what they wanted (and could quantify it) as soon as I sent them the images I’d made (and invariably it wasn’t what I sent them), some wanted something narsty that they could laugh it/show their readers or something that was so far from what actually happened ie just beautiful people as to render it so mystical that it probs couldn’t exist or was not how they thought they imagined it. I guess I provided an honest but positive slant with the images, I always aimed that they were inclusive and summed up the night. Not all people like that, in fact looking back I seem to remember more people not liking my stuff than actually liking it, which is a nice memory. I have a feeling something similar was going on then too, further looking back more personally and 2002 was quite a dark time for me, busy, lovely but on reflection I was in quite a dark place, I was on a precipice that I didn’t realise and then I tipped over into what was quite a long slide into some sort of Dante-esque journey which I’m not sure I surfaced from till about 2018…but I’m out of that now and on a much better path, sorry for that dark interlude but just sometimes it’s worth sharing these things.
Brighter things and again looking for a representative image of what sbh is all about and hot, hot on the heels of the Bella image last week, we have this from Moses at the Loewe show, he looks fucking amazing and rocks it so well, so again this is what I wanted sbh to be about when I set it up…have a look here at
There we go another blog with words that form a lot of content, doin’ alright, aren’t we?
Ciao Bella.