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As Charlie Chaplin once said, “A man’s true character comes out when he’s drunk,” and true character usually makes for great photos. It’s a phenomenon that photographer Maciej Dakowicz has tapped into in his new book Cardiff After Dark, which was just released this month.
From 2005 to 2011 Dakowicz shot photos of people in and around the bars of Cardiff, Wales, capturing a vibrant bar scene that he says he was unfamiliar with until he moved to the U.K.
“I grew up in Poland and it was the first time I had encountered this kind of nightlife,” he says. “It was a natural reaction to take my camera out and start photographing what was around me.”
Not surprisingly, the photos have ruffled a few feathers among people who say they’re voyeuristic and celebrate excessive drinking. Back in 2011 The Daily Mail put together an edit of the project that highlighted the more grotesque scenes and derided the photos as “shaming” and “squalid” (an edit that generated 2206 comments, more than 13,000 likes on Facebook and countless clicks for the English newspaper’s website). Other news sites have also linked the photos to an ongoing narrative about excessive drinking in the U.K.
But Dakowicz says he’s not trying to exploit the situation or make fun of the people he’s photographing. He’s only received one real complaint from someone involved in the photos and it came from the subject’s mom. “Documenting a drinking problem was never the intention,” he says.
The photos he likes the most aren’t the ones that seem to celebrate drunkenness but rather the ones that are more complex and unexpected. One of his favorites shows what appears to be a homeless man collecting discarded McDonald’s bags lying next to a bench. On the bench is a woman in hair curlers who is talking to a man in a pinstripe suit. The photo has nothing to do with drunk people but is still a uniquely weird and fleeting moment.
“It’s like an abstract situation completely,” he says. “Those people are from two different stories and they shouldn’t be in one frame but they are and that’s what makes the pictures interesting for me.”
Another of his favorite photos shows a man doing push-ups with another man on his back. On the right side of the frame two men hug and on the left an onlooker takes a picture of the push-ups.
Dakowicz says that was the first photo he came upon one night and had no idea what was going on. He made the picture because he liked the way all three scenes worked together.
“When a picture creates more questions than answers that’s when it’s successful for me,” he says.
Dakowicz hasn’t shot any photos in the streets of Cardiff lately because he now lives in London. But this weekend he’ll back in that city for a show of the work that is going up at a gallery he co-founded. He expects as least some of the subjects to show up to the opening, which will create the real litmus test for the work.
“I think it’s definitely going to be interesting,” he says.
All Photos: Maciej Dakowicz
