Studio 54

Daily Mail

Mia De Graaf

It was a Pandora's Box of eccentricity and glamor.

Open for just 33 months from 1977 to 1981, Studio 54 remains the ultimate discotheque.

Only the beautiful, famous and socially-connected could be sure of entry.

The lucky partygoers that made it into the New York City establishment reveled among celebrities, blaring music, champagne, bubbles, costumes, art, theater - and occasionally animals.

Hundreds, however, never managed to pass the red velvet rope.

For those left out in the cold, award-winning photographer Tod Papageorge was there - and has now compiled the madness into a book.

Here is a taste of his spectacular insights.

GAYLETTER

Jeffrey From

His book is filled with energized black and white photographs, packed with scantily clad socialites and dazed celebs alike. The pictures whir with lights, masks, and glitter-smeared bodies stumbling down the avant-garde rabbit hole that was Studio 54.

Artinfo

Craig Hubert

And this is also where the best photographs take place. Persson, in his introduction, mentions that to “catch movement on the dance floor,” he developed a specific way of taking pictures, using a flash on his subjects while leaving the shutter open for 30 seconds. This technique creates a spotlight on his subjects, where faces tended to be in focus while the bodies around them are a blurred whirl. While Persson takes credit for the technique, it was certainly something that existed in street photography, even to a certain degree in paparazzi photographs of the period. But there’s no doubt that Persson’s club images, like wild action-paintings come to life, buzzing with exuberant energy, form a template for the kind of photographs that proliferate on the Internet. Take a look at any party photographer from the last four decades, and their images certainly bare the mark of Persson’s photographs, even if they don’t realize it.

The Guardian

Peter Conrad

In Persson’s jittery images, a fanged Dracula materialises on the dance floor at Halloween, along with Lady Godiva on a white horse. A figure swathed in bandages might have escaped from an emergency ward, or perhaps from an Egyptian sarcophagus. On the sidelines, deputising for photographic voyeur, hover Warhol with his tape recorder, and the glum, gnomic Truman Capote, concealing his inquisitorial gaze behind dark glasses.