An interesting fact about Montreal-based photographer Long Xi Vlessing lies in his own self-description. In an interview with Liminul, he confesses, “I have always been really attracted to people and strangers especially, even though secretly, I am very socially anxious.” Equally striking is his nightlife photography which, since last December, has been the primary visual conduit for one of Montreal’s premier queer party collectives: Hauterageous Worldwide. Being Vlessing’s first foray into club photography upon the request of his friend and the collective’s primary organizer—DJ, producer, and artist Mossy Mugler—this seemingly juxtapositional fusion thrust upon Vlessing, a photographer of a fiercely introspective nature, an interesting challenge. How does personal introspection meet collective expression to produce humanistic extrospection?
Smartly, Vlessing came to rely on the very juxtaposition that initially daunted him. Into the mass of bodies buzzing and gyrating in the dark, in an event staged upon the premise of impulsive, senseless expression, he approached Hauterageous’ dissident disco raves with the poetry and soul of a street photographer. In a style evocative of Daniel Arnold’s sharp wit and the innocent wonder of Helen Levitt, he quickly carved for himself and Hauterageous a niche, visual signature in Montreal’s nightlife scene; focusing his eyes on capturing the wonderfully awkward and vigorously queer frequencies that build from the most eclectic of crowds.
One picture from a Hauterageous event posted in December aptly summarizes this ethos. In it, two dark-haired women layered in black and sheer fabric pose editorially on what seems to be a leather couch. A respectable distance from them, two partygoers sit, unaware that they, too, hold the frame. One twirls their neon pink hair and stares into darkness while the other, whose hair is short and neon green, looks at one of the posing girls with an expression between awestruck wonder and curious desire. Despite the spontaneity of it, the clash of aesthetics is effectively comical, producing an image layered in a distinctive ironic visual language flowing between equally serious representations of identity. On one hand, we see pure, uninhibited expression. On the other, a certain absurdity emerges.
In another image, a similar contrast emerges in which an older man in a “dad hat” grimaces against the white flash of the camera. He wears a faded long-sleeve graphic t-shirt, and despite being fully clothed, he is completely exposed in a moment of intense private enjoyment. In contrast, the person next to him wears only a studded belt around their chest, we read nothing from them besides their youth and their choice of dress. Other young people around the man bear nonchalant, muted expressions. This visual dichotomy occurs here again as youth rubs against age, where the fully clothed come against the barely clothed, and two different kinds of partygoers—caught in an unspoken generational friction—come together to make art by simply partying next to one another.
While one might expect such humour to impose embarrassment upon its subjects, the scene instead lights up with a static spark. Humour, which Vlessing identifies as important to his photographic practice, turns him into a playful conspirator implicit in each shot. “Of course I want everyone to look cool and fitted,” he says, “but sometimes at a party, bad angles and coke noses are par for the course.” Absurdity, he insists, exists next to glamour as its equal. Amid the excess of the personas he encounters and the guarded fronts they project, Vlessing watches for the moments when beauty takes on a theatrical quality, which he finds mostly in the borderlands between the crowd’s real and imagined personas, when the mundane flirts with the euphoric, and self-consciousness wrestles with total abandon.
Within this mold, an intimate awkwardness naturally occurs within a Hauterageous crowd of such drastically varying expressions of identity. Energy transfers between Vlessing’s subjects despite their seeming aesthetic oppositions and singular personas, equalizing them all under the spell of the rave, their shared love of music, and the similar need to express and escape real life.
As with street photography, Vlessing works best when he delivers surprise. In the moment of photographic shock, when the white flash blinks against the black of the dark, he achieves memorable images by insisting on the affective power of mundane relations between people and their environment. In the case of Hauterageous, this mundanity exists in the difference of personality, experience, and story between subjects who nonetheless share an ethic around coming together as a community in relation to their own queerness or the queerness of others. 
Queerness itself becomes more complicated in Vlessing’s work. Across the Hauterageous crowd, it manifests through what writer José Esteban Muñoz in Cruising Utopia describes as a “photographic instance of the utopian performative.” From the euphoric open-mouthed roar of one person to the closed eyes of partiers lost in the tender sway of ecstatic experience, queerness, through Vlessing’s eye, becomes a projection of an imagined freedom, happiness, and utopia against the dominant social modes of being as much as a gendered expression of the Queer self. It exists between a man with a hand slack between his legs, dressed like a hypebeast cliche in a snapback–chain–Jordans combo, and the miniature bouncy castle he sits across from. It manifests in a person smiling slightly, with colourful circles painted on their face; and in the image, taken from behind, of two people folded into one hoodie so they look like a singular four–legged fortress embracing itself.
From this vantage point, a single shot of the crowd may reveal what Vlessing describes as the “microcosm.” “The lineup of DJs and performers is always different,” he says, “So you’ll see all sorts: TikTok goths, Rageface-era emos, IG clout monsters, indie sleaze ‘revival’ pushers, drag queens, Toronto mans, baddies, perverts, straight guys in Aviators on ecstasy, and the gays and the dolls.”
As an observer, Vlessing does not insist on his subjects in proximity to each other as much as they do in the dark dreamscape of the rave. Visually, his photographs describe a beauty in the decision to exist alongside one another, bearing and sharing ourselves with ourselves. Through this interrelation, the image becomes a composed whole. “The alchemy exists in individuals embedded with their own meanings,” Vlessing describes, “contributing to this larger formation of collective identity.”
As they dance, flirt, kiss, and exchange energy, the ravers circulate their emotions and stick to one another in literal and subliminal ways. People feel free to open their wounds, and others feel emboldened to provide a soothing connection. If we are all in pain or all in love, Vlessing investigates the impulse that makes us want to share it in order to be made well. Ultimately, what he always reaches to observe is phenomena like this, which are “as old as human interaction.” He acknowledges that “it’s cool to see it happen in real time on a large scale,” knowing such collective unity is always temporary.
Multiplicity, therefore, is a necessity for Vlessing. In his imagination and image-making, he understands what Roland Barthes describes in his seminal work Camera Lucida as the photograph being contingent and therefore located outside of meaning. “One moment, the person in front of me is a cipher, and the next, they are a snapshot image ripe with meaning,” Vlessing states. By this logic, Barthes reasons that photography works effectively “not when it frightens, repels, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.” By the same logic, Vlessing captures photographs to which meaning arrives only where his intent interacts with the spectator’s interpretation as they think in conversation with each other.
In one such photograph, where a person’s exposed lower half dominates the frame like a carved sentinel of flesh, meaning may arrive where the arms fall parted at their sides, emitting a passively sacrificial eros, like a feminine refraction of Christ at the crucifixion. In the belly dancing hip scarf tied at their waist, one may read a euphoric aesthetic and sexual expression of a cultural identity. But, this could just as well signify the aesthetic and sexual antagonisms that drove such an expression away from the light of day, making the multiplicity of an Hauterageous rave the safest place for this person to exist in their fullness.
Just like that, Vlessing demonstrates how what appears hopeful and utopian suddenly becomes a dramatization of loss and despair. In the people watching this dancing figure from behind and below the raised surface they stand on—some enchanted, others not even looking—we may also glimpse what Muñoz describes as the “disappointment that is a part of utopia” for queer people, “the hangover that follows the hope.”
For Vlessing, the image always holds this tension, bearing the full truth of the structure of feelings and expressions that operate in the circuit of queer belonging. “Hauterageous is a queer party, firstly,” Vlessing says, “so it’s a celebration of love as much as it’s an elegy for what could not be.” Against his will to document a liberated space, the spectator meets their desire to be folded into it, a reward we cannot enjoy until we reckon with the immensity of the reality being handed to us.
Reality, Vlessing asserts, contains as much sexuality as it does desolation, as much desire as unfulfilled longing. By reckoning with these seeming opposites and holding them in equal measure, we earn our way into life’s sweetness. Then we rejoice among the shining faces. Then we join in the hypnotizing rhythm of bodies animated by all that terrific beauty.
Jonathan Divine Angubua is currently finishing his undergraduate studies at the University of Toronto. He enjoys any interesting art and is always looking for great book recommendations. As a writer and lover of fashion, he is most inspired by strangeness and beauty.