As the 70s bled into the 80s, New York was in a bind. The city had narrowly avoided bankruptcy in ‘75 and was dealing with an increasingly terrifying existential crisis brought upon the queer community via the AIDS epidemic. The Son of Sam killings had women constantly looking over their shoulders, and for a healthy percentage of New Yorkers, the rise of newly elected President Ronald Reagan contributed to a general sense of defeat and malaise. Creatively, the Big Apple’s underground scene was thriving, but overall, society was in disarray—sound familiar?

“I think there are a lot of parallels in terms of culture right now,” party photographer Sharon Smith tells V over Zoom. “Sometimes, when there’s a repressive political situation, culture can thrive, actually. I’m kind of looking for that to happen again. I don’t know how it’s going to happen, but I wish for that.”

Camera Girl, Smith’s new book, features a collection of party polaroids taken at iconic dance clubs of the era like The Ritz, Area, Red Parrot, and the Palladium. It’s star-studded, sweat-slicked, and supremely inspiring to any young partygoer in despair today. “I really wanted to express that creative joy and fun that happened in the middle of what some people would have called a bleak time,” she says with a comforting, toothy grin. “I hope they’re going to be inspired by what they see in terms of the creative expression of that particular period and how it can be an inspiration for the present moment.”

Growing up on a Virginia farm in what she described as an “unintentional community,” Smith was exposed to photography by one of her fellow community members. When she left the farm, it was to attend a photo course at a community college just outside of Washington, D.C. There, Smith studied under photographer Frank DiPerna. (“Who actually also ended up using a lot of Polaroids in his work,” Smith points out.) One day, she spotted a flier for Apeiron, an artists’ workshop in upstate New York.

“There was an image by Ralph Gibson. He’s a black and white art photographer who was sort of surrealist in his vision,” she says of the flier’s artwork. “I went to a workshop with him, and my mind was totally blown. It was like, ‘Okay, I’m a photographer. I’m going to go on this path.’”

Smith stayed at Apeiron for three years—in that time, she landed on the Polaroid as her weapon of choice—before deciding to move to the city. “Like a lot of young people, I wanted to come to New York to be an artist,” she says with a downtown been-there-done-that romance. “And, also like a lot of young people, I had big dreams and very little money.”

At the beginning of 1978, Smith made the big move to New York. By May, she had a gig photographing high school prom sweethearts at the Copacabana. By July, the regular photographer returned, and Smith was out of a job. Soon, though, she picked up a position as a camera girl at The Ritz —one of the most cutting edge clubs of the 80s. “It was the first place that had music videos and that was the year that MTV really came alive,” she says. “So it was kind of a hot place in that way.”

The dozens upon dozens of namedroppy photo subjects featured in Camera Girl include Andy Warhol, Prince, Madonna, Grace Jones, and Debbie Harry. When asked if there was a particular pinch-me moment while working at the clubs, Smith says, without pause, “I mean, seeing David Bowie was a thing, of course.” The whole point of the camera girl role was to approach partygoers and offer them a memento of the evening in exchange for cash, a solicitation that had the potential to go sideways. “He was very gracious; he turned his head, and I took a beautiful picture of him.” A gentleman.

As an on-the-ground documentarian of party culture, we’d be remiss if we didn’t ask Smith what she thinks makes a party into a banger. “You really need to have good people at a party,” she says. “And the willingness to forget what you carry in with you at the door. Just let it go.”

CAMERA GIRL IS NOW AVAILABLE FOR PURCHASE VIA IDEA BOOKS.