Tod Papageorge’s Studio 54 takes us inside New York’s most infamous club. During the late 1970s, 54 was the place to be seen, attracting thousands of people including models, actors, rock stars, artists, designers and politicians. Papageorge’s exquisite images are filled with all the decadence and glamour that one would expect from the era. Of this image, Papageorge says: ‘Three keyboards of teeth, as many smiles, and six handfuls of shimmering glass. Now to drink!’ A 10th anniversary reprint of Studio 54 by Tod Papageorge is published by Stanley BarkerAll photographs: Tod Papageorge

New Year’s Eve, and a hurricane of celebration generated around an exposed breast

Tod Papageorge: ‘Although I made these photographs more than 45 years ago, I’ll never forget watching this scene unfold near dawn on New Year’s Day, 1978, while I waited in agony for my flash battery to show whether it could power another exposure. After more than a minute, the ready light finally sparked on for what would be the last time that morning, just as a balloon fell slowly down to the very tips of the woman’s fingers, her head arched achingly back to watch its fall. I pressed the shutter, and the room was lost in light’

‘One can discern in the dark the backstage lights of a theatre and some plywood skyscrapers. The balloons will be released at midnight, long after the aerialist has spun her way down to the dancefloor/stage’

Studio 54 was, and remains today, a theatre, with raked seating filling the floor at the top of these stairs – a generous space where, during the life of the club, exhausted dancers repaired for rest or other pleasures

Carolina Herrera, the fashion designer, and one of the few well-known people in these photographs, stares ahead and commands the picture, a Cleopatra on her burnished throne

While photographers were common, most were there to simply search out the rich and famous. Papageorge’s images transcend the obvious, transforming the glitter into something akin to poetry. Papageorge describes this image as follows: ‘A ten-gallon hat, a vial of drugs (presumably), and a breast-adjacent cup of ice cream gathered up and joined forever in a flash’

‘Who can guess what’s she’s feeling: exhaustion? Exaltation? We don’t know, and the photograph will never tell us. Consider, however, what is given: the bright, glowing dress, the hand over the heart (and dramatic head toss), the delicate throat and shoulder blades. Photography’s unaccountable gifts’

‘I used a medium-format camera – which produced a negative four times larger than my usual Leica’s – to make these pictures. Spandex, and flesh, glow with the difference’

‘That tendril of smoke, igniting two cigarettes and something between the men. At least that’s the tale the picture’s handsome symmetry suggests, whatever the facts of the moment were’

‘Once inside [Studio 54], everyone there seemed thrilled by the fact, no matter how they’d managed it, an excitement fed by the throbbing music and brilliantly designed interiors, which, on a party night, could suggest anything from Caliban’s cave to a harem’

‘Show, don’t tell’

‘I was inspired in this work by the example of Brassaï, the great Hungarian/French photographer of pre-war Paris. Case in point: this young woman, whose intense look (magnified by makeup), exposed body, necktie and cloche invoke the 1930s and the Master’

‘Photography can transform the unimaginable into certainty. Three half-nude Santas descending a staircase? Really? Here, look!’

‘Oh to be so trained in sophistication as to own a collapsible top hat, and the unselfconsciousness to sleep in public, at least when comforted by lilies’

‘That elegant line – beginning at the point of the cigarette ash, then continuing through the woman’s hand and down her lower arm – is beautiful, as she herself is. But what of the bruise toward her shoulder?’

With the 1981 appearance of the New York Times’s first article about Aids, the general licentiousness that had abounded in Studio 54 soon came to be understood by those who’d observed it as a herald of imminent tragedy

‘Does this concern an immemorial need to honour beauty, or a likely failed search (consider the glitter) for a dropped contact lens?’