"Good night, London": Party People in British Nightclubs

EVERY DAY PHOTOGRAPHERS AROUND THE WORLD looking for new ways to tell stories or to capture what we previously did not notice. We choose interesting photo projects and ask their authors what they wanted to say. This week we are publishing the Good Night London series of 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 setting of nightclubs in London - in order to understand how nocturnal affects the way people perceive themselves and want to look.

"Good night, London" is a series of documentary portraits that I made in a number of London nightclubs. When shooting people in a not very friendly environment, I tried to show that this unnatural environment plays an important role in shaping the personality of teenagers and their worldview. Traditional studio photography is thus taken out of its usual context and moved to a completely different environment. Calmness and contemplation, usually attached to studio work, are replaced by the noise, bustle and aggressive nature of a nightclub, which serves as a backdrop for the depiction of heroes. Posing in front of the camera becomes another element of the game, part of the role that club visitors 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 just snatch and capture the real scenes in the clubs, for a second turning the roar and insanity around them into serenity and serenity.

The photo came quite late in my life. I studied the visual arts and was sure that I wanted to become a graphic designer. But in the end I began to drift away from design and more and more immerse myself in art: I realized how powerful a tool for expressing ideas is. I was always interested in portraiture - not only as a way to capture reality, but also as a tool capable of getting to the bottom, revealing the identity of the person depicted, often disguised by layers of self-representation. The fact that I shoot young people for my projects is directly related to my personal experience. I myself am part of this medium, with which I work as a photographer. It can be said that in this way I explore myself, because in a certain way all my heroes 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 the spontaneous manifestations of the surrounding life and fix them with the help of technical tools created for studio work, there is a paradox: you create a kind of parallel reality, and so there is a reflection on the line between reality and fiction.

A photograph gives a sense of belonging to the moment, it is able to reduce reality to one frame and surprisingly catch and keep things purely random. Perhaps, for this I love her most of all - often I myself find myself the first surprised viewer who saw an unexpected result during development. This is an amazing feeling. I use a bulky widescreen camera, which is not so easy to shoot, it requires a lot of concentration. So my work is born at the junction of two extremes: on the one hand, it is the thoroughness of the technical process, and on the other - the inevitable unpredictability and complete chaos around.