In The Discos I Never Talked to Anybody

The all-human night landscape that triggered Vitali's curiosity back in the 90s is suddenly deprived of its function in Lorenzo Leone’s photographs of empty discos taken during the 2021 lockdown. Leone's work unveil carefully designed structures for entertainment, making us reflect on the wider leisure machine where we all live in. His pictures were eventually gathered in the publication ‘Disco not Disco’, a tribute to the book ‘Disco to Disco’ which features Massimo Vitali's photographs of nightclubs and Gabriele Basilico’s dancehalls.

“Back then discos were places where I went driven by I don’t know what idea… Anyway I’m glad I took those pictures, but I don’t know if I would do them again today.”

M. Vitali

Massimo Vitali: Back then [smoking] was an incredible thing – we would come home in the morning filthy, smelly, we had to wash our cameras, our suitcases, our clothes. It was another world. I remember the smoke gave this dirty feeling, discos were quite unpleasant places, you know, seen today. Today I would never go to what was a disco back then.

Lorenzo Leone: Actually, the idea that also comes out from your photos is this. Maybe because everything is very brightly lit and therefore revealed. The idea is of an unpleasant place.

M.V.: Yes, also heavy. While on the other hand in yours they are quite acceptable, apart from some stools turned over because they have been there for so long, however the fact that they are empty made them seem less heavy to me. Back then discos were places where I went driven by I don’t know what idea… Anyway I’m glad I took those pictures, but I don’t know if I would do them again today.
[…]

L.L.: One thing that occurred to me, although it was not what pushed me to make the photos, but it occurred to me thinking about it afterwards. As you said, in these photos discos might even look like nice places. In my photos you can see spaces that are the result of planning, showing care in aesthetic solutions, architectural solutions, but that are visible just in the moment when I photographed them with the backstage light on and empty.

On the contrary, in the moment they are used, that is, the destination for which they are made, all that refinement is not visible. And it’s also kind of what you mention in the conversation in the book “Disco to Disco”, every once in a while a pipe pops up, a piece of architecture, but actually they are places filled with people who then become the subject of your photographs.
[…]

“The historical moment influences how twenty years ago your focus was on the people in the discos while, in my case, today it is on their absence.”
L. Leone

L.L.: One thing that I found funny was the closing of that conversation that is in the book “Disco to Disco” where you say, “In the discos I never talked to anybody.”
Paradoxically, this is the same thing that happened to me with the difference that in your case there were thousands of people. Perhaps a presence, that however vast looks quite irrelevant from the point of view of interrelation, as if it had no individuality, except then finding it in the photographs.

M.V.: The thing was really remarkable in the sense that we would go, we would ask permission from the discotheque’s owners who you could never talk to. It was all people who at three o’clock in the afternoon are asleep, at five o’clock are asleep, then at eight o’clock have dinner, then go to the disco. Disaster. It was already difficult enough to get in touch with the discotheque’s owners. Even once we got the contacts we wanted to talk to, finding them was difficult. They were silent people. Plus when we got there they wouldn’t give a damn and wouldn’t talk to us. We would set the flashes, the rest, people would not talk to us, so we would stay seven, eight, ten hours in a place absolutely alone.
[…]

L.L.: Another interesting aspect, which goes beyond the discos, was an excerpt of the conversation in the book Disco to Disco, in which Giovanna Calvenzi points out how the needs of photography are related to the historical moment in which they are produced, showing moments that one does not always want to investigate in the contemporary, but instead taking on a role as an important document later on. Therefore, back to us, in the discos, the historical moment influences how twenty years ago your focus was on the people in the discos while, in my case, today it is on their absence.

M.V.: Definitely, we are always witnessing. The most useless things turn out to be the most interesting, in my opinion.

Lorenzo Leone, Disco not Disco, Pesaro, 2022.

Browse more pictures of Discos on Massimo Vitali’s Archive.

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