Studio Paradiso

Studio Paradiso collects Max Natkiel's portraits of the people who passed through Amsterdam's Paradiso club across the 1980s, a decade he spent photographing its crowd rather than its stage.

Natkiel worked as a kind of house portraitist for the venue, pulling punks, new-wavers, rockers, mods, Rastafarians, squatters, and metal- and skinheads aside for direct black-and-white portraits against whatever wall or doorway was at hand. First circulated in small photocopied booklets at the time, the pictures are gathered here into a single 623-page volume of nearly 600 images, with trilingual text (English, Dutch, French) including an introduction by philosopher Dirk van Weelden. The book was issued with four different cover photographs distributed at random.

Natkiel's project sits alongside other social-documentary portraits of European subcultural nightlife, distinguished by its single fixed location and its long duration: one club, one photographer, one decade, returned to night after night.