"Good night, London": partygoers in British nightclubs

Every day, photographers around the world are looking for new ways to tell stories or capture something we haven't noticed before. We choose interesting photo projects and ask their authors about what they wanted to say. Good Night London is a series by a 30—year-old graduate of the Barcelona University of Fine Arts and London Saint Martins. For this project, he shoots his contemporaries, young British party—goers, in the atmosphere of London's nightclubs - to understand how nightlife affects how people perceive themselves and want to look.

(11 photos in total)

"Good Night, London" is a series of documentary portraits taken by me in a number of London nightclubs. By filming people in not the friendliest environment, I tried to show that such an unnatural environment plays an important role in shaping the personality of teenagers and their worldview.

Traditional studio photography is thus taken out of the usual context and moved to a completely different environment. Calmness and contemplation, usually attached to studio work, have been replaced here by the noise, bustle and aggressive nature of the nightclub, which serves as a background for the image of the characters. Posing in front of the camera becomes another element of the game, part of the role that clubgoers play, captures the image that they broadcast at night, and how they position themselves in the context of nightlife.

These are not staged shots — the shots only snatch and capture real scenes in clubs, for a second turning the roar and madness reigning around into calm and serenity.

Photography came into my life quite late. I studied fine arts and was sure that I wanted to become a graphic designer. But in the end, he began to move away from design and immerse himself more and more in art: I realized how powerful a tool it is for expressing ideas. I have always been interested in portraiture — not only as a way to capture reality, but also as a tool that can get to the bottom of it, expose the personality of the person depicted, often disguised by layers of self-presentation.

The fact that I shoot young people for my projects is directly related to my personal experience. I myself am part of this environment, with which I work as a photographer. It can be said that in this way I am exploring myself, because in some way all my characters are a reflection of myself: we belong to the same generation, they are my contemporaries.

I usually draw inspiration from my personal experience and from the context in which I am personally immersed. I like to explore the possibilities of documentary photography, destroying and deconstructing the fundamental principles of this genre.

In the very attempt to catch spontaneous manifestations of the surrounding life and fix them with the help of technical means created for studio work, there is a paradox: you create a kind of parallel reality, and so there is a reflection on the boundary between reality and fiction.

Photography gives a sense of belonging to the moment, it is able to reduce reality to one frame and in an amazing way capture and preserve things purely random. Perhaps that's why I love her the most — often I myself am the first surprised viewer to see an unexpected result when developing. It's an amazing feeling.

I use a bulky widescreen camera, which is not so easy to shoot with, it requires a lot of concentration. So my work is born at the junction of two extremes: on the one hand, it is the scrupulousness of the technical process, and on the other — the inevitable unpredictability and complete chaos around.