Glitz, glamour and infamous excess: Dizzying photos from inside Studio 54 reveal the star-studded debauchery of the world’s most famous disco
Nearly 40 years after it opened its doors to a flood of party-hungry movie stars, fashion royalty and debaucherous disco dancers, Studio 54 remains the most famous night club America has ever known.
This month, Swedish-born photojournalist Hasse Persson releases a breathtaking compilation of his first-hand experiences at the New York discotheque, where he routinely captured the dizzying hedonism on film from 1977 to 1980.
Like a booze and drug fueled fever dream, Persson’s ‘Studio 54’ freezes a red-hot moment in disco-era history into 200-plus pages of spellbinding, head-spinning imagery.
Standouts in the vivid, black and white shots are such colorful characters as Andy Warhol, Truman Capote and Bianca Jagger.
But, nearly always sharing the frame with these notables, are the professional level partyers whose presence made Studio 54 the white hot cultural touchstone it was for a brief but memorable 33 months and continues to be in society’s collective memory.
As the tome is billed at artbook.com, ‘Almost 35 years after the club’s unceremonious and sudden closure, this beautiful hardback volume superbly documents the zeitgeist.’