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Merlin Bronques had no formal photographic training, but his pictures of New York and Miami club life have attracted legions of followers to his website, lastnightsparty.com.

If you want to make Merlin Bronques laugh, ask him to describe his photographic technique. “Instead of using a zoom lens, I just walk closer,” he explains with an embarrassed chuckle, leaning back in a booth inside South Beach’s Miss Yip restaurant. “I get these e-mails every day from photographers who want to know what kind of equipment I have, or the exact kind of outboard flash I use.” He shakes his head incredulously. “I don’t use any outboard flash! I don’t care about f-stops or white balance. And I can’t be bothered with Photoshopping or cropping. I’m more concerned with energy. If the perfect shot isn’t there, there will always be another shot later on in the night.” His father, a respected portraitist, is the professional in the family. But Merlin Bronques? “I don’t know much about the art of photography at all,” he insists.

A 30,000-strong cult of international admirers would heartily disagree, all of whom log on daily to Bronques’ New York-based website, lastnightsparty.com, for an intimate look at, well, last night’s party. His handiwork remains striking, even amidst the glut of nightlife and fashion-critiquing blogs he has helped inspire since launching in October 2004, expertly capturing a demimonde of club kids from Downtown Manhattan to downtown Miami. Loose, louche and definitely ready for their close-ups, Bronques’ subjects eagerly strike poses that owe as much to imagined takes on Andy Warhol’s notorious Factory shindigs as to today’s Girls Gone Wild videos.

Yet amidst all the playful breast baring, foot worship and dishabille glamour, what makes Bronques’ photos truly memorable is their, yes, technique—one that seems to reflect Bronques’ personality as much as his eye. With only a few conspiratorial whispers and the pop of his flash, he’s able to suddenly unearth the extrovert buried just beneath the skin of even the stiffest wallflower. “I want you to be a little bit more than yourself, to be the superstar you’ve always imagined,” he says. And who doesn’t want to feel like a star, if only for one night?

“You know when you go to a movie?” he continues. “For two hours you lose yourself on-screen. But then you have to walk out of the theater and go back to your humdrum life. Well, what if you didn’t have to? Nightlife should be just like that movie—larger than life. I always try to depict it as just that exciting.”

He pauses to reconsider and flashes a mischievous smile: “On the other hand, these are photos of real people. These aren’t drawings. If I’m taking a picture of a girl lying down on the concrete floor of a warehouse party, pouring vodka all over her naked body, that really did happen. Sometimes you just need to encourage people who are on the fence.”


	Merlin Bronques’ unorthodox style may raise eyebrows, but no one disputes his ability to capture the essence of an evening, as is evident in these stills from opening night at Set in Miami Beach.

Not everyone has been quite as charmed with Bronques’ antics. “Some people call my site pornographic,” he grouses, a label he rejects. “Jane magazine even wrote that any girl who considers herself a feminist would hate my website.” Meanwhile, gawker.com has been merciless in lampooning even his fully clothed subjects as hipster fashion victims. “Sometimes I feel bad on weeks when there’s less content about my site. What would those guys do without me?” he retorts wryly. Bronques’ own description for LastNightsParty and its galleries? “Fun.”

Still, love him or hate him, the media has certainly been paying attention. Last year publisher Abrams Image issued a hardcover book of his photos, while a legion of marketing firms now use his site to do their street-level cool hunting and trend tracking from the comfort of their laptops. Indeed, LastNightsParty has quickly gone from a hobby to a bona-fide job, with Bronques being hired to shoot events around the country in the hopes that some of that “larger-than-life” vibe will rub off—or at least attract fresh eyeballs.

Even MTV has gotten in on the act. Midway through our dinner conversation, Bronques is recognized by a German television producer, desperate for an update on his entreaties. Bronques politely explains he’s already in talks with the Viacom-owned youth-culture behemoth. So, will it be Jackass, Laguna Beach, a cameo on The Hills, and then Last Night’s Party, the television series? “First I have to find the right format,” he demurs, quickly changing the subject. But don’t suggest that his work can’t translate to broader audiences.

“If I go to Vegas, I definitely want to go where you’ll find the hipsters and the rockabilly chicks,” he says. “But I also want to go where you’ll find the silicone strippers. Miami has that same undercurrent: There’s a hipster contingent and there’s a really good-looking, fabulous contingent. And they mix.”

Or at least that’s the idea that has brought him to Miami tonight. The Opium Group, owners of Mansion, Opium Garden and Privé, have flown him down to shoot the opening of the latest addition to their string of South Beach nightclubs, the decidedly swanky Set. It’s an odd match, given that the memorable debauchery in Bronques’ photos is more commonly associated with slumming indie rockers than with VIP rooms and models behaving badly. But to The Opium Group’s vice prez of communications, Vanessa Menkes, that mash-up is precisely the point.

“Everyone’s so used to montages of socialites and the local jet set, it’s almost a yawn at this point,” Menkes says. “But Bronques captures the joie de vivre of Miami Beach in a different way. With him, it’s not, ‘Look at that photo of that celebrity!’ It’s, ‘Whose breast is that?’ He has the perfect sense of humor to translate this city’s decadence.”

At the moment, old-fashioned Beach decadence is certainly on hand. The Wilhelmina modeling agency is celebrating the launch of their VH1 reality series, The Agency, and Set is filled with clusters of leggy runway walkers and the combative Italian gentlemen who seem to magnetically follow them around town. Promoter Michael Capponi has a woman on each arm as he frugs atop a banquette, actor Mickey Rourke chats up a few underage-looking specimens, Beach Commissioner Michael Gongora engages in some after-hours constituent outreach, while The Miami Herald’s new dating columnist, Fred Gonzalez, is left to bemoan the economic injustice of being a 30-something journalist on the clubland prowl: “They want to syndicate my column nationally and I still can’t afford dry cleaning,” he quips.

Bronques however, is less focused on the boldfaced names. A flurry of movement, he glides around the room leaning his six-foot-plus frame into the ears of curious women. The effect is often immediate: Previously stony-faced patrons suddenly brighten and begin mugging away, sometimes disappearing with Bronques into a back room for more private photo sessions.


Merlin Bronques makes himself and a friend the subject of a photograph during opening night at Set in Miami Beach.

What on earth is he whispering to these women to make them melt so quickly?

“There’s no mystery,” he answers. “People are dying to express themselves. I’ve never heard anyone say, ‘I want to be inhibited.’ ”

Oh, come on! Let me hear one of your opening lines....

But Bronques just laughs and moves back off into the crowd, snapping a photo over his shoulder as he goes.

At one point in the evening he intercepts a bored-looking Julia Stiles, leading her to a smaller upstairs room where the DJ is spinning hip-hop. Soon enough, the actress and her friends are in a circle, happily grinding away and trading off the type of supple B-boy moves Stiles displayed in Save the Last Dance. Tellingly, though, Bronques’ photos from that scene—tailor-made for a glossy spread in Us Weekly—have yet to appear on LastNightsParty. And it’s doubtful they ever will: The appearance there of A-listers is the rare exception, not the driving rule.

“I love creating a fantasy world with my photos, but celebrities aren’t really a part of that,” Bronques says. While he can appreciate the work of nightlife contemporaries such as Patrick McMullan and Ocean Drive’s own Seth Browarnik, he’s after a different kind of shot. “Whenever I see those books of photos like Disco Years, there are so many stars. But what about all the other people on the dance floor at Studio 54? When future generations look back on this era, or at least at my pictures, they’re not going to have that problem.”

1. The 24th Miami International Film Festival unspools
To the familiar carnivalesque strains of Darrell Stuckey’s fingers gliding across the Gusman theater’s 1926 Wurlitzer pipe organ, the Miami International Film Festival kicked off another edition. The newspapers may be full of talk about the death of Old Hollywood, the curdling of New Hollywood, and the lack of interest on the part of the kinder to watch anything beyond YouTube. But inside the Gusman, on this sweaty March night, it was easy to forget all that as outgoing festival director Nicole Guillemet swept onto stage in her trademark pearls and white silk scarf, announcing in her crisp French accent the start of one of “the premier events of Miami’s cultural life.”

The audience politely suffered through the required thank-yous and shout-outs to local grant-wielding pols (was that a boo at the mention of County Commission Chairman Bruno Barreiro’s name?), and then promptly lost themselves in Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book, a gleefully perverse take on the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, and about what you’d expect now that the director who immortalized the split-beaver shot with Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct has decided to update the Anne Frank story. A great, big, pulpy comic book transferred to celluloid, Black Book serves up an SS officer with a heart of gold, a bucket of feces slowly poured over the head of its lead actress, torch songs galore, and—this is Paul Verhoeven—exposed pudenda. Needless to say, the film received a standing ovation. Ah, Miami.

Cornered at the after-party, Guillemet said that while she was looking forward to rejoining her mathematics-foundation-heading husband in Boston—the genesis of her departure from the fest—there was still an undeniably sad tone to her final days in South Florida. “It has been hard spending so much time away from my family,” she explained, “but when you see the response of people to these films, it’s overwhelming. I’m going to enjoy every last moment of introducing these movies.”

Tightlipped about the identity of her already named successor (unannounced at press time), Guillemet instead smiled diplomatically and begged off any advice so the next fest director might avoid David Poland’s fate of being unceremoniously fired following his debut 2002 outing.

“The Miami Herald went after me because I wasn’t Cuban,” a still chastened Poland griped to Los Angeles magazine this past February. That may be a bit much, but here’s a tip for whoever fills Guillemet’s heels: In a town where style is everything, take a lesson from Poland’s missteps. Do not bound on stage at the august Gusman in sneakers, blue jeans and—gasp!—sans belt. In fact, why not borrow Guillemet’s scarf? It can look just as dashing when rakishly tied around your head, as seen on director Bruce Weber (pictured) three nights later, while introducing his rereleased 1988 documentary, Let’s Get Lost. A gorgeously lensed reverie on the troubled life of trumpeter Chet Baker, Weber’s film filled the Beach’s Colony Theatre with a reverent crowd, including what looked like every model he’d ever photographed for the last decade’s worth of his Abercrombie & Fitch catalogs.

But Weber wasn’t after solemnity when the subject at hand was the original bad boy of West Coast jazz. He recalled an earlier screening in Los Angeles, when a surfer acquaintance arrived late from Malibu with his girlfriend in tow. Lying on the floor in front of the screen, the young couple’s attention began to drift: “They started making out, then they’d doze off, wake up and start making love again.” Afterwards, embarrassed moviegoers sidled up to Weber to offer their apologies for such déclassé behavior. Wasn’t he mortified? “Oh, no!” Weber laughed. “Chet would’ve loved it!”

2. New Art City: MIA versus NYC
After the frenzy of December’s Art Basel, schlepping up to Manhattan in chilly February for that burg’s similarly arranged Armory Show and attendant satellite art fairs may seem anticlimactic, not to mention—brrr!—masochistic. But it did give some of Miami’s tyros the chance to continue strutting their stuff before eager collectors. The Fredric Snitzer Gallery wowed with a massive new painting by Bhakti Baxter, a blue-seeped portrait of his grandmother that was simultaneously eerie and regal (pictured). Baxter’s previous, abstract work has drawn plenty of attention—but with this strikingly figurative approach he’s operating on an entirely different level, one where he’s liable to give Hernan Bas a run at becoming this city’s most exciting young brushman.

A few blocks away, the Scope fair was in full swing, with new director of development Adriana Farietta (formerly of Locust Projects) at the reins, offering galleryhopping tips and gamely adjusting to those New York winters. A taste of the old Rocket Projects was also on hand, in the form of now independent curator Nina Arias corralling a Ryan Humphrey installation for Scope’s entryway. The Ambrosino Gallery showcased a sprawling watercolor from Chris Doyle, a Brooklynite who’d crafted a tribute to a night at the Beach’s Sagamore hotel, while the Spinello Gallery highlighted the darkly alluring drawings of femmes fatales by Argentine expat Santiago Rubino.

This fall, Spinello moves to a new gallery space on the same increasingly congested Wynwood block as Snitzer—just in time for another round of Basel madness. “I’m 21,” gallery head Anthony Spinello proudly informed me. “I’m the youngest dealer in Miami.” So now you can legally drink at your own openings. Beat that, New York.