A Thousand Slurred Words
Gabriel Lussier captures the wild animals of Montreal's clubs.
By Jack Oatmon
Whether you want to treasure the mementos of your youthful ambivalence or do anything 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 entombed, so the photos might as well be cool. Gabriel Lussier is a local photographer who has taken it upon himself to capture the brilliance and fury of Montreal's club scene in quality images that transform the traditional, wasted and compromising bar pic into something of beauty and diligence. The Mirror spoke to Lussier over a beer, under the din of a throng of carefree, bar going revelers.
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 that 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.
M: Sure, 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, within the timeframe in Montreal right now, I want to do an archive. So that in ten or twenty 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.
M: I guess that's kind of the same thing I'm doing, only with writing. Maybe it's not relevant in a political sense, but culturally I think there's something happening that's worth documenting.
GL: 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.
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 eighty-five to ninety percent 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: Yeah, well people experiment at the club. Like in terms of fashion, things hit the club before they hit the runway; things hit the club before they hit the stores.
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, and that's what I want to capture.
M: That's it: the idea of capturing this crazy time in this crazy city.
GL: 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.
Gabriel Lussier shoots with a Nikon D70 and his photography can be seen at www.flickr/photos/draglion.