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Some club nights will never stop being legendary. If you were in Manchester in the 1990s you might have been lucky enough to party at the Hacienda. Londoners who were there to experience the freedom of expression at Leigh Bowery’s mythic Taboo still tell you how progressive it was.

New Yorkers, however, will always be nostalgic about Studio 54 - the world’s ‘most famous celebrity nightclub’ that claimed that it could make anyone a star on the dance floor.

On a good night, you could spot anyone from Andy Warhol and Liza Minnelli to Richard Burton, Mick Jagger and Grace Jones. But while paparazzi were clamouring onto chairs to get a shot of the most famous person in the room, one photographer was aiming his creative lens at the ‘real’ faces of the New York night.

Bill Bernstein witnessed first hand the last days of the disco scene in New York, documenting how these glitter-soaked evenings unfolded for the the clubgoers who graced not just Studio 54 but Paradise Garage, Mudd Club, Hurrah and GG’s Barnum Room before taking the subway home in their Stan Smith’s and gold stilettos.

Bernstein began shooting the disco scene in the late 1970s, when The Village Voice assigned him to document an awards ceremony at Studio 54 - which, at the time, he described had a reputation that was “somewhere between Sodom and Gomorrah.”

What he saw that night gave him a physical high. “Over the next five or six hours my world underwent a metamorphosis,” he says. “Throughout the club I saw imagery that reminded me of Brassai's 1930s photographs of nightlife in Pigalle or Diana Arbus on the Streets of New York. I got very drawn into what I saw there, primarily the inclusiveness of different subcultures and cultures all meeting up in one place.“

It was this sense of freedom and expression, he says, that drew him to document the disco scene and its clubs with his camera over the next three years.

The glamour and grit of Steve Rubell’s Studio 54 was the epicentre, says Bernstein. But it wasn’t always easy for the non-rich and famous to get in at the door.

“You either had to have some kind of special look about you, whether it was a costume or an attitude. I don’t really think there was ever anything that was written down describing who they’d let in.”

His photographs, which form part of a book called Disco: The Bill Bernstein Photographs, capture the sense of freedom and uncensored decadence of the disco community - whether you were a dancer, poser or simply a voyeur to the nightlife.

“I think people and the culture has changed a lot since those days,” he says. “New York City in the Seventies became a haven for artists around the world, because it was very cheap - much like Berlin was ten years ago.

“People like Alan Ginsberg and Philip Glass, artists from all over the world came to New York. It was one of the most creative moments in the city’s history.”

During this period of artistic liberation, Bernstein says he witnessed how the Civil Rights Movement, the Women’s Rights Movement and the LGBT Stonewall riots instigated the emergence of disco as a melting pot for social change.

“All of these things just happened by accident together,” he explains. “They talk about perfect storms, you know. Disco was a place where all of those movements would end up on the dancefloor and, as was writer put it recently, it was like a victory dance for all of them. Like ‘we’ve made it’.

“The whole time I was shooting at those clubs, I never saw an argument. I never saw a fight. You had transgender women from Puerto Rico dancing next to Wall Street brokers - and there were smiles on their faces. There was no judgement.“

Having lived through four decades since disco’s golden era came to an end, Bernstein says is hesitant to think there will be another scene that will prove to be as important to the radical multiculturalism of New York.

“I think that’s like asking if there will be another Beatles. It’s really hard to say because it was really just complete coincidence that these four guys happened to be born in the same city and at the same time.

“It’s the same thing with disco. You can’t fabricate it. Because it would be phoney. I think people try to fabricate that kind of thing today and it’s just not the same.”

Bill Bernstein currently has an exhibition called Night Fever: New York Disco 1977–1979 at the Museum of Sex in New York until 19 Feb.

'Disco: The Bill Bernstein Photographs' is published by Reel Art Press and is available to buy now

Follow Liz Connor on Twitter: @lizconnor_