What Sven Marquardt Guards in Daylight

Thousands of people have had their brains dissolved inside Berghain—chemically, rhythmically, sexually—and I’d wager most of them couldn’t describe the entrance from memory if you asked. That’s what total immersion does: the experience so completely swallows everything around it that the container just disappears. Sven Marquardt stands guard there every night making his inscrutable decisions about who belongs on which side of the door, and that door—the entrance to possibly the most fascinating club on earth—is just a door. Steel. Industrial. Entirely beside the point.

Sara from Finding Berlin did what someone needed to do and went around Berlin in full daylight photographing these places when they’re dormant: Berghain, Cassiopeia, Bar25. The images have a quality that’s hard to name. The buildings look like warehouses, which of course they are, and yet knowing what happens inside at four in the morning makes looking at them in afternoon light feel faintly vertiginous—like a theater with the house lights up and no one on stage.

Many clubs have already disappeared, Sara writes, but I realized that many, many more have since appeared. Some I’ve never visited—and probably never will. There’s something honest in that. The night city has its own geography, its own landmarks that only make sense in the dark. Photographed at noon, stripped of everything that makes them what they are, they look like nothing. Which is, maybe, exactly what makes them work. All the photos are over at Finding Berlin.