Billy Monk

Billy Monk: Night Club Photographs collects pictures Monk took as a bouncer at the Catacombs, a dockside nightclub in Cape Town, through the 1960s. He started shooting the club's patrons to sell them prints as souvenirs. The habit grew into a record of the room's drinking, fighting and interracial mixing, all illegal or taboo under apartheid.

The book reprints 47 duotone photographs with a foreword by David Goldblatt, who called Monk an insider photographing insiders: the trust in these pictures survives the brandy-fueled bravado of the poses. Monk stopped shooting at the club in 1969. His negatives sat unseen for a decade before they were found and shown at the Market Gallery in Johannesburg in 1982. Monk was killed in a fight two weeks before the opening and never saw the work exhibited.

Monk had no other photographic career and made no other body of work. This book, and the Market Gallery show before it, are why the Catacombs pictures are known at all. They remain a singular document of a South African underworld that apartheid was built to keep separate.