Merlin Bronques Does Berlin

My actual life goal—the one I’ve never said out loud—was never power or money or any of the things you’re supposed to want. It was simpler and more embarrassing: I wanted to run a website as good as LastNightsParty. Merlin Bronques, a gay Black photographer from New York with an inexplicable haircut, built the thing I had been aiming at without knowing it. Technically a disaster. Spiritually untouchable. Raw, sexy, completely itself. Him and The Cobra Snake between them did more to shape what I thought a personal website could be than anything else I found online. I am an unrepentant fan, forever.

So when he passed through Berlin that weekend and started shooting parties—underground clubs, the KitKatClub, whatever assembled under the umbrella of "Europeans Are Free"—I paid close attention. Three sets, each pulling a different thread of the city: the sweaty underground, the notorious sex club, the particular brand of liberated insanity that Berlin exports to the world. He shot the hottest women, the most unhinged men, and presumably a few things that never made it online. That’s always been the deal with his work. You feel like you’re seeing the actual night, not the version someone decided to show you.

I still want to be that when I grow up. I probably won’t get there. But I keep looking.