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In the late 1990s, the photographer shot images of dancers at niche London club nights. He reflects on how smartphones have changed the scene, and how his pictures became a bookSome years everything happens at once. In 1998, the photographer Ewen Spencer started taking shots of nightclubs for the Shoreditch-based style magazine Sleazenation around the same time that he became a father. For the next three years, Spencer would spend each weekend racing between clubs with his Mamiya 6 rangefinder camera and then get back home to Brighton to look after his son, Kuba, on Monday morning. Two decades later, during the first pandemic lockdown, Kuba was helping his dad rescue a digital archive from a deteriorating hard drive when he became fascinated by the club pictures. “His eyes upon it made me realise the significance of it,” says Spencer. “He said to me, ‘When were you doing this?’ and I said, ‘While you were sleeping.’” This became the title of the digital folder and, now, a handsome book.In magazines such as Mixmag and Ministry, club photography was primarily an advertisement for club culture, bright and glamorous, but Spencer came at it from a different angle. He had recently graduated from Brighton School of Art, where his lecturers included the documentary photographers Mark Power and Paul Reas. He was also inspired by Wolfgang Tillmans, who began his career photographing Berlin nightlife. “I saw someone who was capturing his experience in 360,” Spencer says. “It was a new approach to a documentarian’s body of work: very personal, very subjective. This was a world that I understood: music and style coming together in a little room somewhere. I just applied my passion and love for that school of photography to my other passion and love, which was the northern soul scene.” Continue reading...