Sound of Midnight
Clément Paradis

Sound of Midnight
Clément Paradis
Timeshow Press
French and English

Softcover
First Edition of 100
248 pages
220 x 140 mm
2014
ISBN 9791092753035

French photographer Clément Paradis writes in the introduction to Sound of Midnight that he realised in his teens that all he wanted to do was party. Triggered by reading Bret Easton Elis’s Glamorama – a book of satire that meant to serve as a warning against celebrity culture and consumption – Paradis says he started to go out nearly every night of the week. “We wanted to be cool kids, floating away from all the sweat of the everyday life, surrounded by chicks whose only passions are fashion and parties.” What follows are night photographs of parties, drinking, nude girls, pissing, and then more drinking, more pissing, more girls. Everything is seen through blurred vision and shadows. Printed on smoky matte black paper, the book smoulders with nightlife that refuses to acknowledge the existence of the morning after.

‘One night I was outside of a club in London, I think at that moment I started to hear it… The Sound of Midnight… How many pictures did I take that night? One roll? Two rolls, three? When I ran out of rolls, I’d re-expose the previous ones anyway. I’m a trigger happy, it always helps to wash the doubts away. People nowadays are afraid of the silence. Every day, as the propaganda tells us the precise opposite, we feel less human and less loved–as a photographer, there’s nothing I can do about it. But past midnight, when the smell of perfumes, cigarette and restaurant grease mix, when the humming of the bass echoes in the streets, when I hear this Sound of Midnight, I get this appetite for action, for images and for their destruction.’