Penguin People 2 is a new photography book by Ariel Semmel, which presents photographs he took in the 1980’s at Penguin and Liquid, two iconic nightclubs in Tel-Aviv that nurtured punk/alternative club scenes. In the words of Avi Pitchon, the book is “the first comprehensive documentation of this scenefocused specifically on photography, offering a look at the everyday life and aesthetics of the Penguin scene from the perspective of an insider, a member of the tribe.”
“As an adopted child, loneliness has accompanied me throughout my whole life. I was taken from my mother’s breasts when I was only two days old, and given to a 45-year-old Holocaust survivor, who hadn’t been legally approved to adopt. “Buying” a baby on the black market in Israel in the ’60s was easy. You paid, someone erased something that was written in pencil, and that’s it — “Mrs. Semmel, here’s your new baby!”
This loneliness made me very antisocial. The police came to my house for the first time when I was 5, and by the age of 12 I had the first case of juvenile delinquency. I was charismatic, talented and popular, but deep down only I knew that I didn’t connect with anything. I left school at 16. I would wander the streets, hating everyone, the way they walked or talked, and especially the houses they returned to. I didn’t feel at home anywhere, certainly not in my own home.
One day at 18, a friend told me about the Penguin Club — a place with unfamiliar music and uninhibited people. We went there, to a dark passage in the back of the filthy Allenby St. I went down the black stairs and heard the Bauhaus’ “Bela Lugosi’s Dead”. The bass and the creaking guitar flowed through my body without resistance, around me, there was a carnival of angular and slightly robotic dancing, beautiful, sassy and liberated girls. It felt like home.
The Penguin was immersed in a kind of human freedom that was nowhere to be found in the restrained, provincial, and puritanical Tel Aviv outside. I was at the Penguin every day. For the first time in my life, I wanted to belong. I started bartending there, and the crazy, sexy, socially rejected collection of deranged people became my family. I was an exception among exceptions and the Penguin became my home. Two decades of loneliness have disappeared. I was one with everyone. The camera and the flash were always on under the speed rack at the bar. I photographed everyone with love, without judgment, and that is exactly what this book is — my family album.”
Ariel Semmel
