Photo: Anna-Lena Kraus.
We’ve all had that moment of reckoning. Catching your reflection in the bathroom mirror, the dawn light scintillating on your skin, after a particularly hard night of partying. “Is it really me?” you wonder to yourself. You seem both younger and older at the same time, world weary but somehow wild and vital with freshly acquired knowledge. It may be just a new and purer version of you.
Berlin-based photographer Anna-Lena Krause’s series The Aftermaths, currently on view at Sweet Harmony: Rave|Today at London’s Saatchi Gallery, captures exactly this feeling. Always “fascinated” by the way she and her friends looked after parties—“exhausted but somehow pure”—Krause started to take pictures of her friends on the way home from the club. “It was like the idea we had of ourselves was worn out from being awake and dancing all night, so a version that cared less would come out.”
The photographs, all in crisp black and white, are both blank yet fiercely stirring at the same time. Her subjects—gussied up in bondage gear and mesh, or else boasting bare chests—stare unflinchingly at the camera against non-descript white walls. On their own and outside of the camaraderie of a nightclub, her subjects assume an unexpected seriousness, a sombre earnestness, a vulnerability as if to say, “this is who I am.”
Krause describes it poetically when she says, “We all have ideas about ourselves and are aware of what we want to show in a photograph. But I find when we are too conscious of that, we are not portraying ourselves anymore, but an idea of ourselves. I wanted to capture something that was more real. I was searching for honesty in that moment of exhaustion.” That sense of honesty emanates from Krause’s photos—the expressions of her friends linger and lodge in the mind, because in a way we see some of ourselves in them too.
By extracting her subjects from the chaos and clamour of the club, Kraus emphasises the partygoers who make Berlin nightlife what it is. “It’s not portraits of the nightlife, it’s portraits of the people participating in it. It is about them. There is no party without the people.”
See the full series below:
All photographs by Anna-Lena Krause.
Sweet Harmony: Rave|Today runs through to 14 September at London’s Saatchi Gallery.