Camera Girl — After stumbling across a newspaper advert in 1980, Sharon Smith became one of the city’s most prolific nightlife photographers. Her new book revisits the array of stars and characters who frequented its most legendary clubs.
Dallas native Sharon Smith landed in New York during the winter of 1978, with dreams of becoming a photographer. “I was a bit lost and terribly naive, with no clue how to make a living,” says Smith. “It took me a while to figure that out.”
During summer 1980, Smith happened upon a ‘help wanted’ advertisement in The Village Voice. The legendary nightclub, Copacabana, needed photographers to work high school proms. “Suddenly, I found myself lugging an old-fashioned press camera from table to table, feeling a bit like a dinosaur shooting black-and-white pictures of kids half my age,” she remembers. “Nevertheless, I was a ‘camera girl’.”
Smith knew what the people wanted, and she gave it to them again and again, building up a reputation that drove her colleagues mad with jealousy. “They saw how much money I was making. It wasn’t good for morale,” she says. “I was so successful, I got fired as soon as prom season was over.”
It was, in retrospect, all for the best. Smith paid a visit to the Ritz, a new wave club in the East Village, and pitched the idea of a “camera girl” to management. They knew a good thing when they saw it, and she immediately got to work.
Over the next decade, Smith crafted an extraordinary portrait of ’80s nightlife at its dazzling heights, now collected in Camera Girl (IDEA Books). The book brings together never before seen photographs of Grace Jones, Debbie Harry, David Bowie, and Iggy Pop with a delectable array of rare birds who flocked to clubs like Studio 54, Area, Palladium, and Mars while most New Yorkers were sleeping.
Every night before work, Smith transformed into “Rose”, a persona inspired by the “camera girl” aesthetic of ’50s B movies. She donned a slinky black dress, black lace fingerless gloves, satin heels, and red lipstick, and carried film supplies discreetly in her disco bag. Smith worked 11pm to 2am on weekdays, and until 4:30am on weekends, charging $3-5 a photo, earning $300 (upwards of $850 today) on a good night.
At the time, instant photography was a luxury few could afford at home – but a night on the town was just the time for such luxuries. “I remember a group of hip hop kids at Roseland Ballroom, each of them wearing a gold necklace,” Smith says. “They all took off their bling and one by one, each put on all of the necklaces and got a shot. ‘Throw me one’ was their way of asking me to take their picture.”
Blessed with an eye for style, Smith understood beautiful people wanted nothing so much as to be seen and recognised. The patrons, pleased with their portraits, happily posed for a separate shot for her archive. Celebrities like Madonna, Andy Warhol, Sylvester, and Eartha Kitt freely mingled in the crowds, ready for their close up.
“I began to see my job as an incredible opportunity to combine performance, choreography, and a dash of psychic sensitivity with the more obvious goal of taking a good picture of all these amazing looking people,” she says. “I considered the pictures that I created for my personal collection concrete slivers of that time and place that I grabbed from my lived experience and preserved in plastic.”
Camera Girl by Sharon Smith is published by IDEA Books.
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