This photograph is named Man in a Three-piece Suit Dancing Within the Circle at a Wedding, Rockville Centre, NY, March 1976. The bride was Elaine Sherman, mother of my friend Rhonda, who I’d known since seventh grade. Mrs Sherman was getting married for the second time and the dancing man was the husband’s son-in-law, though I don’t remember his name or what he was dancing to.
As the title says, it’s a circle dance, where people get into the middle and do their thing. And this guy sure did – he was marvellous. I saw him and just grabbed my camera – boom! I was using a pretty wide-angle lens and a head-on flash: I like to have people all lit up, like stage lighting. All the way to the left of the picture is a woman with just part of her face showing – that’s my mom, Sunny, who was friendly with Elaine. I wonder now how I came to be looking down at the guy, because I’m only 5ft 1in. Was I standing on a stool or a chair? I doubt I’d have done that. I must have been holding the camera at some elevation.
Usually I ask permission to take a picture, but people knew I was photographing. And Elaine was aware that I’d grown up taking pictures of my Jewish family and friends in Long Island, and was working on a series focusing on that community. I included this picture when I successfully applied for an artist grant to become a photographer documenting Jewish New York – which I did between 1978 and 1979.
The year after I took this picture, I registered for a class taught by the Magnum photographer Bob Adelman. He told me about a Valentine’s Day party at New York’s Copacabana nightclub: the Coyote Hookers’ Masquerade Ball. Coyote was an acronym for Cast Off Your Old Tired Ethics, and I went dressed as a girl scout and talked my way in with my camera. Since moving to New York in my early 20s in 1975, I’d spent a lot of time exploring and photographing the club scene, but that one really got me hooked – the costumes, the dance, the decor, the amazing sound system. Soon after I met an adventurous, fun-loving woman called Judi Jupiter on a bus back from Mardi Gras and we started hitting the clubs together: Studio 54, Paradise Garage and so many others. I’d often take my camera.
So this photograph is a cross between my suburban home pictures and the club ones – it captures the excitement of nightlife. I think I do nightlife with a street photographer’s eye, in that I like to capture unexpected action. I don’t usually go places to take photographs, I photograph where I’m going.
I had to cut right back on clubbing when I started teaching in Brooklyn in 1981. The photographs I took there over the years were the basis for my first monograph, which I didn’t publish until 2014. People commented on how full of life the people in those pictures appeared, even though the neighbourhood was so burnt out and destitute, but the people I’m always attracted to photographing are those who project confidence and joy. There’s so much misery and unfairness in the world and so many hard lives. Personally, I want to capture the reasons people want to go on – I’m drawn to the dandelion coming through the concrete.
I do have a vintage print of this picture, which means at the time I found it interesting enough to print, which was quite unusual back then. It did eventually appear in my book Purgatory and Paradise: Sassy ’70s Suburbia and The City. It feels like a transitional photograph that combines my interests – family and friends, a celebration of life, dance and joy, unexpected talent. I can imagine this man standing around at the wedding, looking like a mild-mannered guy, and then, wow! What a dancer.
Meryl Meisler’s photography is included in She Sells Seashells at Alice Austen House, New York, from 6 September to 21 February