The pictures that Stephen Barker took inside New York City night clubs are “strong images about movement—people moving toward other people, glances that convey the desire to connect,” Hilton Als writes.
Just the other day, I passed the building on East Fourth Street where so many of the scenes in the sixty-four-year-old photographer Stephen Barker’s pictures took place. At first, I couldn’t remember the name of the venue. New York will do that to your memory. The city is always heaving, jackhammering up its past to make room for so many uncertain futures.
In any case, when I saw that door, I remembered that Club 82 was named for the street number of the building it occupied, and that it stood across from an Italian joint, and a few blocks away from a storefront where the late Greer Lankton’s dolls were displayed—figures that were about the body, sexuality, and transfiguration of shapes and forms. These markers—Greer’s dolls, and the Italian restaurant—brought other, more significant, details to mind, including The Bar.
After you passed the ticket booth, you were in a sort of foyer. On one side was a small theatre where movies played on a warped screen, and on the other side was the entrance to the area where men met men. It was like a cotillion of cock. Some men were together out in the open, and some were in the booths that lined the walls. Some men sat on a chair or a stool in their underwear or nude, with the booth door open, waiting for company—the right company.
It’s interesting to imagine Stephen Barker’s thoughts about those nights, to consider his interest in recording that world, those moments. The camera gave him a sort of license to look and to see; it pushed his shyness out of the way so that he could interpret this world of men and what they communicated—lust at times, exhaustion at others, desire always—in a world where sex, not convention, had the final word.
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