No Photos on the Dance Floor
Prestel Publishing
Thirty years on from the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the taste of freedom still lingers large in the collective mythology of the city. The techno thump and shudder of its nightclubs, reverberating through the empty post-industrial buildings left behind, are the subject of this impressive tome that explores Berlin’s club culture, filled with the utopian promise of the night that never ends.
Kohei Yoshiyuki, The Park
Radius Books
A secret community of lovers and voyeurs are revealed in this iconic photobook, exposed in Tokyo’s Shinjuku, Yoyogi and Aoyama parks by photographer Kohei Yoshiyuki’s 35mm camera, infrared film and blaring flash. Raw in their snapshot quality, they shine a light on a rarely seen side of Japanese society, where loneliness, sadness and desire mingle in brief physical connection.
Nan Goldin, The Other Side
Steidl
Nan Goldin’s tender photographs of friends, lovers and strangers alike explore the personas and vulnerabilities that we each assume in public and in private. Her influential book The Other Side, first published in 1993 and re-released this year, traces the very real transition between selves experienced by her transgender friends during the 1970s as drag exploded as a social phenomenon, photographed in nighttime performances and relaxing backstage.
Sanlé Sory, Peuple de La Nuit
Stanley/Barker
The fun to be had in cheap bars amidst the flourishing music scene of Burkina Faso during the 1960s and seventies is evocatively captured by photographer Sanlé Sory. His images get right into the thick of the action, documenting the burgeoning youth culture, dance parties, weddings and portraits of his home city.
New York Club Kids, Walt Cassidy
Damiani
New York’s iconic subcultural scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s is documented in this bold new book by Walt Cassidy, a paean to the radical spirit and wild glamour of the city’s nightlife. It is a riot of colour, with intricate costumes and glittery club kids splashing a rainbow across the pages.
Into the Night
Prestel Publishing
Creative spaces have always flourished under the cover of darkness, when tongues are looser and inhibitions are easier to forget. A major new exhibition and book explores these cabarets, clubs, bars and salons as incubators for radical thinking. Organized by city, the book tours the Chat Noir in Paris, the Mbari Club in Nigeria, the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich and many others, spanning the period from the 1880s to the 1960s.
April Dawn Alison
MACK Books
April Dawn Alison was the female persona of an Oakland, California based photographer who lived in the world as a man. April was brought to life with just high heels, make-up and a camera in the sanctuary of his own home—photographed in total privacy, often after dark. This previously unseen body of self-portraits, in this book edited by Erin O’Toole, reveals the remarkable, long-term exploration of a non-public self—at turns heartbreaking, joyous and deeply personal.
The Freedom Within Us
Walther König
East German photography, from 1949 to 1989 in the years preceding the fall of the Berlin Wall, is the subject of this expansive new title, offering a fresh perspective on a little-seen chapter of history. Amidst intense repression and censorship, photography became a medium with which individual freedom could be expressed by artists, with images taken in a clandestine, deeply personal fashion.
