Outfitted with a Polaroid SX-70 camera and often dressed like a moll out of noir films, Sharon Smith spent the years between 1980 and 1988 photographing people at storied New York City dance clubs like Area, Roseland Ballroom, the Roxy and the Palladium. Along the way she also snapped stars like Iggy Pop, Madonna, David Bowie and Prince when they were still young.
Somewhat as 19th-century photographers inadvertently recorded ectoplasmic beings through their lenses, Ms. Smith in her Polaroids captured the fugitive spirit of a rip-roaring city in the days before AIDS laid waste to it. Her souvenir photos, which were developed and paid for by club-goers on the spot, are the focus of a new book, “Camera Girl,” published by Idea. It is an important addition to a canon of work by gifted and self-taught shutterbugs like Bill Butterworth, Chantal Regnault or Jamel Shabazz, who documented seemingly imperishable, yet all too fragile, elements of bygone urban nightlife.
In an interview that has been edited and condensed, Ms. Smith, 73, spoke about capturing the “sex-crazed,” “drug-fueled” and “gender-bending” — to use three terms in her book — club scene of 1980s New York. She also described what people wore to the parties.
Clockwise from top left, photographs taken by Ms. Smith at the Red Parrot in 1982; Roseland Ballroom in 1983; the Ritz in 1980; and New York, New York in 1981.Credit…Photographs by Sharon Smith
How did you get started?
When I first pitched myself to the Ritz, they already had a cigarette girl. So I became the camera girl. I took pictures of people and sold them for a couple of bucks. I had to come up with my own persona for the situation, so I decided to call myself Rose. I wore these slinky black dresses and pumps, like I was a photographer from a ’40s movie. That became my role.
Before you started taking pictures at clubs, you were taking them in the streets. Isn’t that right?
Originally, I started going out to Coney Island and shooting with a Polaroid SX-70 camera. I always loved the whole process of shooting, the performative aspect — standing there for 10 minutes waiting for the image to emerge. Since this was a job for me — I was making a living selling these pictures — eventually I went looking for clubs and the ones that had the most clientele.
