| For almost thrity years, Paul Hartnett has painstakingly recorded street and club style. His portraits are a remarkable and fragile social document, a record of the inventive and excessive sides of youth.
"The idea of 'dressing up' has always been a fascination for me, from the resourcefulness of punk to the the excesses of fashion students, ravers and party 'freaks'."
Hartnett's compulsion to document the extremes of youth culture has always revolved around the themes of consumption, DIY decadence and consipiucous sexuality played out against an urban backdrop.
Paul Hartnett has contributed to i-D, Dazed & Confused, Tank, Vision, Fashion Trend Digest, The Sunday Times Magazine, Independent Magazine, The Sunday Mail's YOU Magazine, The Observer, Let Them Eat Cake, Attitude, Tetu, Squeeze, Blue, Blink, Fused, Time Out, Disorder and many more.
Alix Sharkey,The Independent Magazine:
Paul Hartnett's photographic work reflects the astonishing variety of self-expression that British club culture has witnessed since '76. His pictures are evidence of the way that night life has become a kind of cyberspace, where dreams and aspirations can be realised, and new identities assumed, if only for a few brief hours. It's arguable that images such as Hartnett's will soon be regarded as our real history, a genuine cultural tradition that one day might come to represent what is distinctly British. |
