'What on Earth is going on here?' A nostalgic look inside Ibiza's club scene

CNN

8 hours ago

Dean Chalkley didn't know exactly what to expect when he visited Ibiza for the first time.
It was 1998. The British photographer knew the Spanish island was considered by many to be the 'capital of the clubbing world,' renowned for its nightlife, but he had heard mixed reviews.
'When you're about to go there, there'll be people saying well, it's not as good as it was one year ago, 10 years ago, 15 years whatever. There's always that kind of thing,' he said.
But as soon as Chalkley visited his first club, he was hooked.
'The moment I got there, I was like, this is absolutely amazing!' he recalled. 'Literally off the scale, the kind of theater of it, the energy. People were so friendly. A level of expression and living in the moment and the kind of notion that day turns into night turns into day turns into night and it can go on. Technically, you could have gone out and not stopped, because one club would follow another, which would follow another.'
Chalkley was on assignment for Mixmag magazine, one of the biggest dance music magazines in the world. They wanted to pair him with a writer to approach Ibiza 'in sort of a different way' to the way it had been covered before, he said.
That first night, he and the writer were quickly separated. But Chalkley carried on with his medium-format Fuji camera, which had a fast focus and fixed focal length that made it perfect for the party scene.
'It forced me to get close to people and to work with people,' he said. 'Mixmag actually had a saying: It was a magazine by clubbers, for clubbers. I was with people. I'm engaging with people and I'm dancing as well the whole time. I'm a person who really, really loves clubs and music, and it carries me along. I'm in the moment.'
That first night was where Chalkley began to build his large collection of Ibiza images, many of which have just been published in his new book, 'Back in Ibiza 1998-2003.'
The book offers an unfiltered, nostalgic look at Ibiza's legendary club scene near the turn of the century.
'To some people, it's absolutely the golden era, and it was a moment where the clubs had reached a certain level,' Chalkley said.
He said his book is 'meant to bring the viewer into this wonderful kind of chaos, in a way, and try to translate some of the energy that I was certainly experiencing and I felt that others, everyone who was there, was experiencing.'
Chalkley remembers the wild and wacky performances he would see in the crowds. He recalled how one famous Ibiza party, Manumission, would actually employ clubbers.
'Those clubbers would dress up, and they might just have a vacuum cleaner and be kind of going around the club with a vacuum cleaner. People would be like, what is going on?' he said. 'It's not just confined to the stage. It's all over the place all at the same time — people in character just going around.
'And then what happened is, that inspired the people who would go there. They would then dress up themselves. It was very inspirational and liberating.'
The definition of the word 'manumission' is to release someone from slavery. The idea behind the party was to free people from their everyday lives and responsibilities.
'With Ibiza, you can see that it's almost like, the moment people get off the plane, they lose all of the heaviness that is on their shoulders,' Chalkley said. 'That sort of falls off, and they feel liberated in some sort of way.'
Mixmag had reserved four pages in the magazine for Chalkley's Ibiza feature in 1998. But when he returned with his contact sheets, editors scrapped their plan entirely and restructured the issue for a 30-page spread.
'As we looked at the pictures, we realized that he had produced something we'd never seen before,' Neil Stevenson, Mixmag's former editor-in-chief, writes in the book's foreword. 'Instead of the dark blurry smears or flash-lit sweaty ravers, these photographs captured the joy and excitement of the dance floor. And more than that, they showed the inventiveness and sheer weirdness of the Ibiza scene.'
Chalkley remembers how people from all walks of life would come together for the same hedonistic experience.
'You would rub shoulders with lots of different people. … Everyone was on the same dance floor. It was this kind of cross-pollination, and that goes for age as well as wealth,' he said. 'You would get someone who probably works in a factory dancing right next to someone who is probably a multimillionaire or something.'
Times, of course, have changed. The business side of Ibiza has grown over the years, and superstar DJs are maybe more of the focus than ever before.
But perhaps the biggest difference has been the rise of smartphones and social media.
'I think people are probably more conscious of their own sort of brand, self-image,' Chalkley said. He wonders whether people are letting go as much as they once did.
'Perhaps it's all a bit more kind of studied or restricted because things can be quite Instagrammable,' he said. 'So it's more like, 'I'm going to go there and I'm actually going to perhaps photograph myself having a good time rather than having a good time.'
'That's not to say it will be like that forever, because I don't think it will. I think that will change. And I think certain clubs are restricting the use of camera phones, for example, and trying to encourage people to not just stand there looking at big screens with their phone up all night, pointing at the DJ.'
Chalkley has been to Ibiza about 15 times now in his life, and he hopes his book can give people a chance to experience just a taste of what the scene was once like. The photos come fast and furious, without captions, encouraging the readers to figure it out for themselves — just as they would have to in real life if this all was happening in front of them.
'It's much more like, you've been deposited in this world, and what on Earth is going on here?' he said. 'It's meant to give you a flavor of the experience of it.'
He said every time he goes through the book he discovers new things in his photos.
'I think it reminds you of living in the moment and just casting fate to the wind and being totally immersed in music,' he said. 'And that feeling when you're in a room and the music is loud — it's not just loud on your ears, but it's actually bouncing off your body. You're feeling the rhythm, and that can do some incredible things. It is pretty amazing.'
Dean Chalkley's book ' Back in Ibiza 1998-2003 ,' published by ACC Art Books, is now available.