Selected club photographs
Hauterageous, Montréal
Shanghai Fashion Week
2024-2025
Excerpts from a conversation with Divine Angubua and Long Xi Vlessing for LIMINUL Magazine
Divine Angubua writes:
Vlessing came to rely on the very juxtaposition that initially daunted him. Into the mass of bodies buzzing and gyrating in the dark, in an event staged upon the premise of impulsive, senseless expression, he approached [these] dissident disco raves with the poetry and soul of a street photographer. [...] Absurdity, he insists, exists next to glamour as its equal. Amid the excess of the personas he encounters and the guarded fronts they project, Vlessing watches for the moments when beauty takes on a theatrical quality, which he finds mostly in the borderlands between the crowd’s real and imagined personas, when the mundane flirts with the euphoric, and self-consciousness wrestles with total abandon [...] by reckoning with these seeming opposites and holding them in equal measure, we earn our way into life’s sweetness. Then we rejoice among the shining faces. Then we join in the hypnotizing rhythm of bodies animated by all that terrific beauty.
D: How do you prepare for a night of shooting? How do you get into the groove? What even is the groove?
LX: Have a nap, do my hair, throw on some music, chug a beer and hop on the bus with my camera bag and I’m there in fifteen minutes. The groove is feeling like I’m on a very important assignment. At the same time it’s also remembering to have fun. I pull up and do a shot with the girls in the green room, scope the place out. By that time the first DJ is rounding out their set, so I get a few pictures of them and I’m clocked in for the next eight hours.
D: When you step into a space like Hauterageous, do you envision what you want to capture, or is your process more about surrendering to what unfolds in front of you?
LX: I don’t really ploy. I have an idea of what I might wish to capture but once I'm actually in there, it's a totally overwhelming environment and I’m swept up in the bugswirl. I spend most of the night darting around— if I’m dancing, it’s usually because I’m dancing through the crowd towards something good. The thing is, at these parties the mood can change quickly; there’s an early lull, then all of a sudden someone is getting a tattoo by the bouncy castle, and then there’s an old dude to my left twerking on the floor and his acolytes are gathering, and then a really hot track drops and it’s alive. The moment decisif comes at me fast, so no, I can’t see what’s coming.
D: Your most striking candid images seem to exist in a liminal space between documentation and euphoria contained on the verge of a dreamscape—how do you balance the immediacy of a perfect moment with the desire to craft something almost surreal?
LX: I love an ordinary moment that is unreal, like a very short person dancing with a very tall person. If you look around, that's everywhere. At a party like Hauterageous, I am even more hyper-aware of a dreamscape unfolding. It is a liberated space, people are dancing, and you’re so free. I see faces, trancelike bodies not only responding to music, but projecting sexuality, desire, and also grief and despair. Hauterageous is a queer party, firstly, so it’s a celebration of love as much as it’s an elegy for what could not be. Photography can be a window into this world. There’s always a moment in the night where the whole place is so filled with vape smoke and the atmosphere of the photos starts to get a bit grungy, adding to the dream.
D: [...] The effect on the viewer is deep humour, wonder, and fun. What do you make of the contrast of the flash against the darkness of a rave setting? How does it make you feel to engage these elements in this way?
LX: My number one thing in life is always loving to make people laugh. Even when I’m being broken up with, I’ll crack a joke. This extends to my photographic practice. I love funny pictures. Of course I want everyone to look cool and fitted, but sometimes at a party, bad angles and coke noses are par for the course. I think it’s great when I can get the flatliners and folks on their phone in the corner, like catching the bad kids snapping bubble gum behind the school. Oppositely, people come up to me and ask me to do a whole glamour shoot for them and start posing like Tyra Banks, and they’ve got a broomstick from the supply closet as a prop, or they, like, start climbing a ladder. I think that’s awesome. There’s a photo I got at one of these parties where the composition makes this one dude look super miniature. He looks so tiny. I think it’s hilarious.
D: What goes through your mind when you’re capturing a euphoric moment? Are you an observer, a participant, or something in between?
LX: I am always, undoubtedly, drawn into it. I want to get close to things.
D: Your nightlife photos alone tell me that you are deeply interested in people and the world through people. In observing and reflecting them, and in –what I would call– playing with them. That pure, almost childlike curiosity comes through so strongly in these pictures, as with the rest of your photography (I stalked your website lol). I’m curious about what interests you about people, how this interest culminates into an aesthetic, and how this aesthetic is achieved in a nightlife setting.
LX: I really am. I started taking photographs when I was a teenager and I have always been really attracted to people and strangers especially. Even though secretly I am very socially anxious. I love people, especially old people, though by this time of night they’ve all gone to bed and are dreaming of peanuts or something. A nightlife setting like Hauterageous is so rich with other different kinds of people though, and each night is a microcosm. TikTok goths, Rageface-era emos, IG clout monsters, indie sleaze ‘revival’-ists, drag queens, Toronto mans, baddies, perverts, straight guys in Aviators on ecstacy, and the gays and the dolls, obviously. So, different people, but most are euphoric in the same way, and some are feeling icky in the same way too, waiting all night for a good night kiss that never comes, or thinking to themself, “I can’t make you love me,” or whatever. An idea that cuts through [much of my work] is our private emotions as public matter. I see precisely this unfolding on the dancefloor for hours, where the alchemy exists in individuals embedded with their own meanings, contributing to this larger formation of collective identity. Everyone is dancing, flirting, kissing, and exchanging energy, circulating their emotions, which stick to one another. This process is as old as human interaction, but it's cool to see it happen in real time on a large scale, knowing it's temporary. It’s similar to photography— one moment, the person in front of me is a cipher, and the next, they are a snapshot image ripe with meaning. Maybe the photographic traces of this dance can have some tangible impact when someone is looking at them later, hungover in the outside world.
D: Your Hauterageous photography often captures the energy of a crowd, but also intimate, fleeting exchanges within it.
LX: I mostly ask to take people’s pictures [...] I just tap people on the shoulder and ask, and most say yes. Sometimes people ask me how they should pose. At one of the parties there was a woman who I talked to who had the best smile. Everytime I took pictures of the crowd, she was somewhere in the shot looking at me and smiling. But you know there is a video of Nick Jonas running offstage when he sees a laser pointed at him. And that’s how some people react when they see the camera coming. And that’s fine; it’s why I try to ask, but it’s not always possible. People also say no, but you don’t dwell on it, you just pick yourself up and move along.
D: If someone were to describe your photographic style through a song, which song would you hope they choose?
LX: Here, Madonna’s “Impressive Instant”. Or maybe Perfume Genius’ “Eye in the Wall” or Tom Waits’ “Downtown Train”. Speaking of music, the best part of every Hauterageous party is the inevitable moment when Mossy Mugler queues up Gaga’s “G.U.Y.”.
D: Is there a moment or emotion you’ve longed to capture but, for some reason, never quite have? Don’t answer that. Rather, tell me how that absence and longing shapes the way you shoot now.
LX: I think often there is a pervasive lack of imagination, and a lot of non-images floating around that soothe and do not confront us, that say nothing about our time or our humanity. I always try my best to make images that consider the beauty I see in the world, even if that beauty is awkward or repellent, it is at least worthwhile. I also think that, in general, we need more documentarians. Next I really want to shoot a punk show. Can we make that happen?