Sydney's Club Paparazzi with A Difference

A new generation of committed photographers are out every weekend recording Sydney's social scene. Rachel Olding - aka Lady Fairfax - tagged along to see how they operate.

First, I must adopt a moniker. Then I can go out, camera in hand, and shoot Sydney's nightlife with the city's most sought-after social snappers - the Hobogestapo photographers Lazarus, Carlito, Moses, Deckland and The Kid.

They have a heady weekend of events lined up: an exclusive party for Oyster magazine on Thursday night at The Club (you know, The Club), an underground party for the riotous Bang Gang Deejays on Friday night, a Saturday afternoon event for Modular Records, Gay Bash at The Cross that night (you know, The Cross) and a trip to the illustrious Ivy Pool Club on Sunday. They name me ... Lady Fairfax.

On any night of the week, hordes of social photographers are out snapping club kids as they party late in Sydney's bars and nightclubs. For most it's an exhausting hobby supplemented by a day job or the odd promotional shoot for a nightclub.

Hipsters in stovepipe jeans and non-prescription glasses, girls with untamed curly hair in spray-on leopard-print jeans, baby-faced boys taking drags on their cigarettes, overflowing jugs of sangria, broken noses on the dance floor, even a stabbing in Kings Cross - it's all fair game for the Hobogestapo lens.

In 2006, Lazarus and Carlito (or, when the sun is up, Wes Nel and Alex Singh) were party-goers on the other side of the camera who had a desire to do something creative while they were out at night.

Like most nightclub photographers, it started as a way to get free drinks and climb the hierarchy of clubland. Everyone wants to be a DJ. But if you can't, be the photographer.

Taking "party pics" has become wildly popular around the world, thanks not only to the fact that everyone owns a digital SLR camera these days (and you don't need to be "with the band" to get into a nightclub) but also the successes of others.

Romantic notions of hitting the big time like American pic polestars Last Night's Party and Cobrasnake, who are flown around the world to shoot parties, enchant young bacchants.

Unlike most nightclub photographers, however, Hobogestapo has evolved into a documentary project and platform for photographic experimentation. It is a cache of artistic and edgy snapshots of the city's party scene and party people, created for fun and posterity as much as for cred or cash.

"[It's] an archive that records a specific time and place and where music, youth culture, fashion and lifestyles are in the 21st century. We're building over time this tome of imagery," Carlito says. "Each photographer is a character, if you will, that features in those photographs and documents a time as seen through the lens of one individual."

Their ranks have expanded to include Dorothy in Paris, Artemis in Melbourne, Victor and Dimitri in Brisbane and Carlito, who has mostly relocated to New York. The enterprise has spread to other (more profitable) creative industries and hopefully to overseas "so you can see several cities simultaneously; a more global documentation of youth culture, music and art from cities and people around the world". But, for now, Sydney is where the Hobo heart lies.

As I walk through The Club, camera in tow, eyes light up and hair is quickly primped, in case I choose to hold the magic shutter button down on some lucky person. At the Bang Gang party, the DJ booth is the place to be.

At the Ivy Pool, the girls are bigger, blonder, browner. They make love to the camera - girls kiss girls, men pose in their underwear, a bevy of beauties dance with an old man in a pork-pie hat. It's a superficial and shallow world, say the photographers. Friendships come and go as quickly as DJs and fashion trends.

Adbusters magazine calls these party posers "the dead end of Western civilisation ... a youth culture that mirrors the doomed shallowness of mainstream society ... a culture lost in the superficiality of its past and unable to create any new meaning". These hipsters supposedly stand for nothing and instead go partying for the ever-present photographers "who swim through the crowd like neon sharks, flashing little blasts of phosphorescent ecstasy whenever they spot someone worth momentarily immortalising".

"If you like to pose, Sydney is the perfect city for you," Carlito says. But Hobogestapo doesn't go looking for those people. They try to steer clear of "pose-y, set-up" images or anyone looking to make the social pages.

"My photos are really candid and taken in the moment; a lot of people don't even know they're getting their photo taken," Deckland (aka Patrick Stevenson) says. "I'll see a girl dancing like crazy and I look at her hair and her dress moving and I'll capture an awesome shot with lots of movement in it. I steer away from anything fake."

But can shallowness in people be restored by substance in art? For Hobogestapo, it's not really about the party people, anyway. It's about creative experimentation.

But equally, for the party people, it's not about Hobogestapo, either. It's about the validation of being immortalised for one second. It's just moments of time recorded on film, to be used as Facebook profile pictures or to look back on in 30 years' time and say "partying's just not like it used to be".