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“The disco era was an époque unto itself,” Meisler explains. There’s Grace Jones shrugging her coat off upon entering the club Andy Warhol caught off-guard by the camera and one image simply entitled The Village People Stepping Out, the tribe in all of its feather head-dressed and leather-clad glory. Her photographs are unique in their candour. “I was stunned by how beautiful it is it brought back the atmosphere, mutual respect, a unique time in my life and the world around me.” “I completely forgot about the photo until looking through my archives for the book,” she says. She singles out Self Portrait: Playmate Hostess as a favourite moment. This sense of uninhibited adventure permeates her photographs, along with Meisler’s evidently endless excitement for her subjects. Meisler moved to New York in the late 70s and worked at various go-go bars in the city, where “occasionally I brought my camera, and after working at the bars, I’d go out to discos and after-hours clubs”. Meisler's opportunistic snapshots are steeped in attitude she describes the exhibition's corresponding book, entitled Purgatory & Paradise: SASSY 70s Suburbia & the City, as “sweet and sassy, with a pinch of mystery”. The 70s have become an era for which we today are especially nostalgic, and these scintillating images all but transport us to its infamous dancefloors.
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Meisler has made a career capturing life in Bushwick, New York City, and this series takes the city’s famed disco nightlife as its muse. Behold, then, the perfect uplifting surprise for a Monday morning from Meryl Meisler’s latest exhibition and book, SASSY 70s NYC, which is currently showing at Midoma Gallery in New York. It’s no secret that December can be a difficult month – ironically, at times, a little lacking in exuberance.