



1 / 14 Chevron Chevron Courtesy Bill Bernstein Studio 54, 1979.

In 1977, the Village Voice sent the young freelance photographer Bill Bernstein to Studio 54, though not to shoot the fabulous freaks cutting loose below its trademark “Man in the Moon with a Cocaine Spoon” sign. He was there, instead, to take pictures of an event celebrating President Jimmy Carter’s mother, Lillian, a dyed-in-the-wool liberal who was being honored at the venue by UNICEF for her humanitarian work. Bernstein, like many New Yorkers, had never set foot inside Ian Schrager and Steve Rubell’s storied night club, and after he completed his assignment—including capturing a photo of Lillian Carter sitting next to her date for the evening, Andy Warhol—he decided that he would stick around to find out what all the fuss was about. Once the tables had been cleared and the regulars began to file in, Bernstein bought ten rolls of Tri-X film from a photographer who was heading out the door—and so began a three-year project documenting the last days of New York disco.

Bernstein’s exuberant black-and-white photographs from that time—a selection of which are currently on display in the exhibit “Night Fever: New York Disco 1977-1979,” at the Museum of Sex, in Manhattan—feature scenes from the city’s most beloved clubs, including Studio 54, GG Barnum’s, Le Cirque, Paradise Garage, Electric Circus, and Hurrah, among others. Bernstein made it a point not to shoot the celebrities who frequented the booths and back rooms of the night spots that he visited. Instead, his photos, unlike the most common images from the era, showcase the ordinary people who reinvented themselves nightly on the dance floor, from partygoers striking a pose to the cross-dressing acrobats getting ready backstage at GG Barnum’s. One of the first images that Bernstein shot was of a couple dressed like they were at a prewar cabaret in Berlin; another features a woman staring casually into the camera as a man lavishes kisses on her high-heeled ankle.

This was post-“Saturday Night Fever,” post-Stonewall, and pre-AIDS; disco, which hadn’t yet succumbed to punk rock’s counterpunch, was at its glorious height. Yet the late seventies were also years of great uncertainty. The Cold War loomed; the economic downturn rocked Carter’s Administration. New York City was in debt; crime and drugs were rampant. For the growing conservative movement in Washington, the city’s problems were a perfect dramatization of what America might look like if liberalism wasn’t brought to heel. By the beginning of the nineteen-eighties, disco was in decline, as was Carter’s Administration. But Bernstein’s photos make the case that, in times of social and political upheaval, judgment-free spaces are worth hanging around in, and worthy of celebration.