After the After Party

Ellen von Unwerth’s photographs always feel like they were taken just after midnight in a room that smells like champagne and cigarettes and something more interesting than both. She started as a model herself, which probably explains why her subjects never look like they’re being photographed—they look like they’re enjoying themselves and happen to have someone with a camera nearby. The sexual charge in her work is never predatory; it’s conspiratorial. Everyone’s in on it. The women especially look like they wrote the rules and then decided to break them anyway, just to see what would happen. Her 2011 book After After Party is exactly what the title promises: the part of the night nobody photographs because the cameras are usually already put away.