Grace Jones, David Bowie and Debbie Harry feature alongside lesser known dancers in Sharon Smith’s Polaroids of the city’s club scene, where dressing up was your passport into the creative world
To 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.
