Capturing a night out in the 1950s and 1960s
by David Ford
This is the first in a series of three essays exploring different aspects of vernacular photographs of nightlife. The images used in the essays are all from the author's own collection and were acquired over the last twenty years from flea-markets, antique fairs and secondhand bookshops. Such photographs are increasingly hard to find as they are hidden in boxes of family and holiday snapshots which are now often seen as having no value.
Photograph of couples drinking, 1950s, photographer unknown
When flicking through piles of old photographs in flea-markets you sometimes come across one that makes you stop, either because of its unusual subject matter or the physical qualities of the image itself. What got me about this particular photograph was the man sitting on the right side of the picture. He has one arm around a woman and the other holding a half empty glass. He is laughing into the camera, his face lit up with alcohol, his expression telling you he does not want the evening to end. It is an image of joy, of a love of life, and it moved me because in this man’s face I saw a younger version of my own father. To me my father had always been the sober, middle-aged, family man I had grown up with, weighed down with work and responsibilities. But in this picture I saw him when he was young and it made me sad that I had not known him then, nostalgic for the sociable, carefree side of him I had never experienced.
The photograph was taken by one of the commercial photographers, known commonly as snappers, who worked in nightclubs, dancehalls, bars and restaurants in the 1950s and 1960s. These photographers would tour popular nightspots taking pictures of customers who could then buy a copy as a cheap souvenir of their night out.
Most of these pictures look the same. They are small, black and white1 and rectangular. They nearly all have a number stamped or written on the back2 which identifies the relevant image on the roll of film so sitters could buy a print of it at the end of the night or the following day. Sometimes the name of the venue is superimposed on the photograph and occasionally the nightclub photographs are inserted into paper folders that advertise the venue where they were taken.
Paper photograph folder for London nightclubs, 1960s, illustrator unknown
Paper photograph folder for Paris nightclub
The photographs adopt one of three poses and show couples or groups of sitters, never single people. The surroundings are hinted at but barely visible. The first and most common pose is the table shot.
Nightclub photograph, London, 1960s, Photographer unknown
Nightclub photograph, Paris, 1950s, photographer unknown
Nightclub photograph, Venice, August 1950, photographer unknown
Nightlife photograph, Berlin, photographer unknown
Oktoberfest, 1959, photographer unknown
Here a couple or group of people sit behind a low table, covered with bottles and glasses, often lifting their drinks to the camera3. Behind them you can just make out the crowded bar or dance floor. The second is the line shot where a larger group of guests stand or sit in a line to have their picture taken.
Embassy Nightclub, Plymouth, Christmas Eve, 1954, photographer unknown
Nightlife photograph, 1950s, photographer unknown
Nightlife photograph, UK, photographer unknown
Nightclub photograph, Italy, August 1965, photographer unknown
The final pose shows couples dancing or embracing.
Nightclub photograph, Paris, 1950s, photographer unknown
Nightclub photograph, London, 1960s, photographer unknown
Nightclub photograph, 1950s, photographer unknown
Couples dancing, Italy, 1960s, photographer unknown
In all the pictures, the sitters look, and smile, at the camera. These are posed photographs, not candid shots caught by a hidden lens, although the aim was always to try and capture the excitement of a good night out. The pictures somehow manage to look both dated and immediate. The look of the sitters - their clothes and their faces - place them in the fifties and sixties but their expressions remain fresh and full of life. The pictures sit somewhere between the formal portrait and the casual snapshot. They were taken in public places but are private mementos that were never intended to be displayed, even in the home.
The sitters present themselves to the camera. They are relaxed but determined to put their best face forward. The men have slicked back hair and wear ties and jackets. The women have their hair permed, their mouths ringed with lipstick. The faces are flushed with alcohol and flattened by the camera’s flash. The pictures were souvenirs of a special night out. This was an occasion they wanted to remember. They were records of romance, of celebrations with friends and partners, aide memoires of nights on holiday. Things that seemed important at the time.
Oktoberfest photograph, 1960s, photographer unknown
The men who took these pictures4 worked wherever people would be willing to pay for a memento of their visit whether this was summer holiday and ski resorts, on cruise ships, at festivals5 or around tourist attractions in cities6. They would work the tourist sites during day and the restaurants, bars, dance halls and nightclubs at night. For most it was seasonal work, others moved around, following the crowds across the year or diversifying into other types of commercial photographic work7.
In Michael Winner’s 1964 film The System8, Oliver Reed plays a commercial street photographer called Tinker based on the English Riviera. During the day he photographs tourists on the beaches and promenades. At night he photographs them in the nightclubs, dance halls and bars.
After taking their photograph9 Tinker gives the subject a slip of paper with a number on it so they can purchase a copy of the picture from a shop in the town. The owner of the shop is licenced by the local authorities to take photographs in the resort and has a team of snappers who work for him at various pitches and nightspots across the town, where they are expected to take three hundred pictures a day, earning commission on each photograph sold.
Tinker uses his camera to connect with, then seduce, the young women on holiday. This idea of the snapper as a slightly disreputable character is repeated in the film Alfie10 where Michael Caine plays a snapper taking photographs at tourist sites in London, chatting up an American tourist as he takes her picture in front of Tower Bridge.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, commercial photography continued to decline and by the end of the sixties snappers had disappeared11. The availability of cheaper and easier to use cameras and quick High Street processing meant that people no longer needed someone else to capture their memories.
The only commercial nightclub photographer to attract critical attention is the South African Billy Monk.12 Monk13 was a petty criminal who worked as a bouncer in the Catacomb nightclub in Cape Town in the late sixties. He started taking photographs of the customers to supplement his income. Like the snappers, he took pictures with the sole purpose of selling them to the sitter14 and he adopts the same poses; couples dancing, drinking at tables, customers goofing around for the camera. However, what sets his photographs apart from those taken by other snappers is that they depict more of the seedy, rundown, environment of the club itself and his skill at capturing the wild, drunken, behaviour of his subjects. This gives his pictures a tragic, harder edge.
Snappers took photographs for purely commercial reasons. They were not hoping to catch people off guard or to create pictures that were quirky or unusual. The subjects in the pictures are centred, the poses are cliched and there is no unusual cropping, no odd juxtapositions or clever use of focus. We are interested in them is because of the subject matter, not their qualities as photographic objects. They provide us with a glimpse into a nighttime world that has long since disappeared. Photographs such as these invite storytelling. The sitters are like actors from a forgotten movie and our natural tendency is to speculate about the roles they are playing. We are intrigued by their performance and want to expand and elaborate the narrative, making up stories about them. Who are these people who inhabit this nocturnal world? Why are they there and what are their relationships?
Nightlife photograph, 1950s, photographer unknown
But perhaps there is something more to them than that. The photographs capture people at their most alive, stretching the day long into the night. They have the ability, like many old photographs, to evoke the past and to create a resonance between life and death and memory. If photographs are, as Diane Arbus said, “proof that something was there and no longer is,”15 then these pictures are proof that the people in them were once truly alive. By recording our happiest moments, these pictures can be seen as an antidote to death, talismans against the demise we all know will eventually come.
Nightlife photograph, Germany, 1950s, photographer unknown
Nightlife photograph, Germany, photographer unknown
In 1998, the artist Ian Breakwell produced a twelve-part sequence of found photographs with text called Ghost Dance.16 The photographs had been found in an abandoned drinking club. Like the photographs taken by snappers, these pictures show people dancing, smoking and drinking in a dingy nightclub. By enlarging the photographs and presenting them on a gallery wall with poetic text the artist forces us to scrutinise the images and, in doing so, he imbues them with extra poignancy and meaning. For Breakwell the images represent the human need to leave traces of our lives behind after death. They are evidence of us having existed.
Nightclub photograph, Germany, 1950s, photographer unknown
“There is an inherent melancholy in photography,’ said Robert Flynn Johnson, ‘Even lives recorded by the camera as vital and present will, over time, become ghosts. The inevitability of death hovers over all photography.”17 The nightlife pictures taken by snappers in the 1950s and 1960s show people at their most vital and this is what makes them so poignant. They are fragments of a happiness that once existed. Now over fifty years later we see the people in them as ghosts from a world that has disappeared, spectres from nights carnival, their faces frozen forever by the photographer’s flash.
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The next essay will look at personal photographs from the late 1960S and 1970s and how men and women are represented in them. The final essay will explore how changes in photographic technology and processes reflected the desire to capture our happiest moments and look at particular types of images from the 1920s and 1930s.
David Ford is a writer and artist based in London. He has been a collector of vernacular photography for over twenty years.
[1] Those from the 1950s are always black and white, colour photographs start to appear in the 1960s.
[2] Less frequently the numbers appear on the front side of the photograph.
[3] Subjects are sometimes shown smoking but there are few pictures of them actually drinking.
[4] There were commercial photography studios run by women but all the examples of snappers I have come across working in nightspots have been men.
[5] Oktoberfest pictures are common.
[6] Cruise ships would have their own small team of photographers for the duration of the cruise and the biggest holiday camps would employ photographers for the season.
[7] The protagonist in the novel Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnes (1959) has a sideline taking pornographic pictures.
[8] The System, Michael Winner, Bryanston, UK, 1964
[9] With a small, 35mm camera
[10] Alfie, Lewis Gilbert, Paramount, UK, 1966
[11] Photographers tried to adapt – they introduced colour and tried using Polaroid cameras for instant pictures but these were more expensive.
[12] Born 1937. Died 1982.
[13] See Billy Monk, texts by David Goldblatt, Jac de Villiers and Lin Simpson, Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2011
[14] ‘His aim was not to make a social statement, but to sell the pictures to the people he photographed.’ Jac de Villiers, page 11, as footnote 13.
[15] Diane Arbus, Revelations, Random House, 2003, page 226
[16] Ian Breakwell, Death’s Dance Floor, Ffotogallery and Street Level, 1998
[17] Robert Flynn Johnson, anonymous: enigmatic images from unknown photographers, Thames and Hudson, 2004, page 184
