Shots in the dark

>> Gabriel Lussier captures the
wild animals of Montreal’s clubs

YOUNG MOMENTS: Lussier photos

by JACK OATMON
Photos by Gabriel Lussier

Whether you want to treasure the mementos of your youthful ambivalence, or do anything in your power to forget what happened after you took those tequila shooters, the digital panopticon of the Internet ensures that evidence of your folly will be forever enshrined, so the photos might as well be cool.

In the tradition of party paparazzi like L.A.’s Cobrasnake, Gabriel Lussier is a local photographer equipped with a Nikon D70 who has taken it upon himself to capture the brilliance and fury of Montreal’s club scene in quality images that transform the traditional compromising bar pic, with its wasted faces and red eyes, into something of beauty and elegance. The remarkable results can be seen at www.flickr.com/photos/draglion. The Mirror spoke with Lussier, over a beer, under the din of a throng of carefree, bar-going revellers.

Mirror: What kinds of people draw you in to take photos?

Gabriel Lussier: I’m trying to give an overview of what’s happening here. I want to look at different kinds of people. Sure, eccentric people, people who sort of costume themselves, those people really interest me. They’re different, the way they dress or the way they cut their hair, it’s kind of avant-garde. Some people don’t actually follow fashion, they make fashion, and I think they’re way ahead—well, maybe not way ahead, but they’re part of this frontline pushing things forward.

At the same time, I’m also interested in more average people. Maybe I’m trying to push those people to seem a bit crazier. I want to give an overview—not to be so selective that you only find beautiful and perfect people in the photos. For sure, there are people who don’t go really well in the photos, but it’s a bigger challenge for me to show somebody that isn’t naturally photogenic and catch that person in the right spot and make them look great. So it’s a wide range, it’s not only one type of person.

CHICKS AHOY! Lussier snaps

M: You could just go out and take photos of the most beautiful people at the bar, and lots of people do. But I think there’s something to be said for putting those beautiful people in a realistic context, or the real people in a beautiful context.

GL: Yeah, sure. I’m doing it to party, I’m doing it for style, I’m doing it for design. But the important part of the work I’m doing is, I want to do an archive, so that in 10 or 20 years, I can give a really good idea of what I was living and what people around me were living. I see it as a cultural archive.

That’s why I started taking more and more photos. I felt like there was something good happening in Montreal. I really love Montreal. I’m really proud of it and happy to be a part of what it is and participate in that cultural exercise. There are so many tentacles of it, and I’m in one of those tentacles, but there are many other things happening that I’m not covering, so maybe at some point I’ll go discover that.

REACTION SHOTS

M: How do people react to you when you’re out taking photos?

GL: Some people get crazy. They really like it, so they become kind of a model for you. These people take me as a fashion photographer, so we really interact in a fashion-show way at the party. More typically, I get the permission to take the photos by looking at them and by creating an interaction, showing them the camera. I’d say 85 to 90 per cent of the time, people react well. I like when people get crazy, so I try to give them the message, you’re free to do what you want, I’m looking at you, I want to encourage you to be something that you might not be usually. We’re into that party form, we’re shooting, and sometimes we get that perfect moment, with the music, with the lighting. Good people and good times make good shots.

M: People experiment at the club. Like in fashion—things hit the club before they hit the runway. Things hit the club before they hit the stores.

SOMETHING ESSENTIAL: Gabriel Lussier

GL: I actually think that designers have to be influenced by the people out there doing that. There are a lot of people who go out who don’t work in design, they’re not into fashion, but they have something to express, so they take crappy clothing and put it together, they take pieces of different clothes, put them together and that nightlife style is a very interesting form of fashion, because it’s fashion before it’s fashion in the store. Especially when people really push it. A good party is where people are madly dressed, the music makes you even madder than you already are, and the place turns into a big whirlwind, everything blends together—that’s what I want to capture.

I’m not sure we’re living in a special moment, but it’s our moment. Everybody had their young moment and they probably felt the same. We’re looking at what we’re living in, we’re taking photos, we’re talking about it or we’re writing about it and I think that’s something essential.