T o 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 embarrassmen.