The hours between leaving the club and rolling into bed are often odd ones, where the real memories are made. The last song plays, the lights come on, and you’re face to face with the strangers with which you’ve shared the dance floor euphoria for the last five hours. Everyone’s makeup looks a little crusty, you can see the drink stains on your clothes, and there’s that shared sense of communion as you queue for the cloakroom and trudge into the early hours of the morning. Maybe the sun will be rising, maybe commuters will already be shuffling past the pavements – but for you, the night is not over yet. You can get a kebab. You can scout out an afters. Maybe you’ll go home with that person you’ve had your eye on all night, or maybe you’ll just walk and talk with friends, old and new, with no plan at all. Time becomes elastic, irrelevant; you feel invincible, like the world is yours for the taking.
Mischa Haller, a documentary photographer based in London, spent 1998 capturing clubbers across the UK in those beautiful, strange in-between hours. From Brighton beach to Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, his pictures show British youth in their post-party prime, laughing, smoking, making fires on the pebbled seafront, posing on pavements next to the remains of greasy takeaways and following the night out to its bitter end.
They’ve been compiled into ‘Not Going Home’, the debut book from the British Culture Archive, the non-profit preserving some of the most important documentary photography in British culture – from 1960s mods to northern soul dancers and scenes of Thatcher’s Britain. ‘I was interested in the time between the nightclub closing and people going home, those one or two hours when the rest of the world is asleep, but clubbers are carrying on,’ says Haller. ‘These moments hang in the memory – eating, smoking, chatting, making a fire on the beach or meeting someone new.’
‘I love this series; it captures 90s club culture and that great last era and freedom of youth,’ says Paul Wright, founder of the British Culture Archive. ‘Little did we know where we were heading with the digital age and how it would change society, but these images, as well as being photographically brilliant, really capture those post-hedonistic nights and hazy early mornings beautifully.’ Check some of the images out below.
Not Going Home is available at www.britishculturearchive.co.uk.
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