The Architecture of Underground Dance Music: The Work of Shaun Bloodworth

Abstract

This photo essay presents a posthumous consideration of the work of Shaun Bloodworth, photographer of musicians from the UK underground dance scene in the early twenty-first century. The article argues that Bloodworth sets up in his portraits a connection between figure and background that involves the same re-territorialization of the urban landscape that occurred in the dance scene itself in the late 1980s, when dance music promoters illegally occupied dilapidated unused spaces for parties in cities such as Sheffield, London and Manchester. The catalog of work that Bloodworth left on his death in 2016 can be seen as a series of images which play on a tension between anonymity and celebrity, both of the musicians and of the architectural setting.