In vogue: How photographer Chantal Regnault captured the Harlem ball scene’s rise to fame

But how did an average night of photographing the balls usually shakedown for Chantal? With each house preparing head-to-toe looks for different categories, runway presentations, and voguing battles, Chantal recalls how often there was a lot going on at all times. It was “little by little” that she learned to master her photographic domain over the balls. At the start, she would capture the houses as they walked the runway or vogued against one another, trying to be as flattering as possible. “It was not very beautiful to photograph them where it was badly lit,” she says, now well-tuned to the demands of a glamour girl. Armed with her Nikon S-3, Chantal had to adapt to the low-budget setting of the high-glamour balls. “I wanted to use a flash for the colour, because often those warehouses the house mothers (Dorian Corey, Paris Dupree, Pepper LaBeija, and Angie Xtravaganza) rented were not really nice, and they paid for them out of their own pockets.” But still, Chantal underlines just how incredible it was to be immersed in their atmosphere. “It was magic, it was completely magic,” she says with a glint of ecstasy in her voice. It’s an emotive pull to the voguers that reads clearly in her pictures: every image is electric, alive, loving, and tender. They veer away from voyeurism, and function completely as an uplifting platform to a community that embraced Chantal with such loving arms.

Being a 40-year-old heterosexual foreigner in the midst of the ballroom atmosphere seems as if it would be dauntingly out of place. Yet for Chantal, it was nothing of the sort. “I would often go backstage, and it was like being backstage in a theatre,” she recalls. “All the characters, the models were there and trying to collect the money at the door, and everyone was in the toilets, and the hallways, putting on makeup, wigs, getting ready, being late.” It was a frantic, exciting atmosphere that Chantal often tried to capture, to much avail. She’d show up before the ball began, and stay right up until its closing doors – “often at 6, 7, 9 am.” By the 90s, Chantal was no longer a spectator with a camera. She was the ballroom community’s honorary photographer-in-residence, a friend, and a loyal asset. The photography had become a way to reaffirm an etched out ballroom fantasy: that each member was a grandiose, modelesque, and wealthy uptown woman. “I believed in their fantasy because it would make you feel really good,” she admits. Here, Chantal errs on the defence, a tone that indicates her fierce loyalty to the community remains the same even decades later. “There was no nightlife and we were thinking about all the people we were losing from AIDS,” she explains. “So suddenly walking into the ballroom was like another world where everybody laughs again.” For that time, it was needed. The AIDS pandemic was mocked and belittled by the United States government, despite killing more men than the Vietnam war. Finding strength from their peers was a remedy for queers everywhere. “At the balls, there was always laughing, it was very joyous,” Chantal says in one particularly emotional moment of clarity. “I want to point out, please, that it was extremely joyful.”

Recently, the Kunsthal Museum in Rotterdam opened up a brand new exhibition that surveyed the visual history of ballroom. Naturally, Chantal’s work was featured prominently. She was more than happy to participate in building the exhibition and attending its opening gala – but most importantly, she was overjoyed that more people around Europe could see the photographs she had lovingly taken of her friends back in New York. But how did Chantal manage to be so prolific? “I decided very early on to photograph them all in the way they wanted to be seen,” Chantal explains. “It was very important, and I never tried to catch them half-done or with their make-up not ready or somewhat tired or with their wig on the side, you know? I wasn’t interested in going to that place at all.” She speaks as if this is a given fact, a decision that was never up for debate. As the ballroom participants picked up on Chantal’s eager cooperative and collaborative spirit, they began to willfully direct her: “can you take this photo like this?” became “shoot me like this!” which became “I want to be in this pose.” It made sense, considering ballroom was all about the Black queer and trans community reclaiming an agency of glamour that had been robbed from them in the outside world. “It was all about looking beautiful and real in there,” Chantal explains. “Outside the balls, a lot of them had no money and were living dangerously.” Rather simply, Chantal facilitated a space for beauty and realness within her lens for them all to flourish in.

Eventually, she settled on using black-and-white as her go-to, something that became her “thing,” as she nonchalantly recalls. Whilst Chantal simply chalks it up to being an “inspiring” medium, one can’t help but notice how the black-and-white of each picture brings the ballroom community into a deeply artistic realm – something they readily deserve. Off the back of these photos, Chantal built solid friendships with house mothers, voguers, drag queens, butch and femme queens. Soon, she was being invited back to their houses, tapped for photoshoots, and so on. One particular time, she had the likes of legendary voguer Willie Ninja (of Madonna’s Vogue fame) in a rented studio, giving her direction on how to build his portfolio. “I did the studio shots so I could have more control, but I let them have it all,” Chantal laughs. “I would do very little direction on the shoots. Just free, go with it. They loved it, and it made them feel more like professional performers.” By the end of a day’s worth of studio shooting, both Chantal and her model could walk away with a sizable professional-looking portfolio. The studio shots show another side to the figures of ballroom, as people who were infinitely capable of making art simply by the graphic shapes of their bodies. In their twisted and contorted poses, they are akin to statues of ancient divinity. “I wanted them to be supermodels,” Chantal adds. “They were the first Black models.”

Since so much time has passed, Chantal has grown increasingly astute about her time in New York. Whilst she does reminisce fondly about the balls, nothing is seen through a rose-tinted spectacle. As we go through each picture, she’s reminded of those who have passed, of which she plainly says “is a lot.” Yet with every year gone, Chantal still finds joy in what remains. “To my surprise, and my delight in a way, I was not fully aware of how important my pictures would become as an archive,” she explains. “I knew it was something special and beautiful and that's why I wanted to document it. But, I was not fully aware of the importance of what I was doing.” She pauses here, as if to be careful with her emotions. “Now, only 30 years later, we can see the implications.” As mainstream attention to ballroom has come and gone – Malcolm MacLaren, Madonna, Pose, Legendary – time shows that voguing has always been a commodity to some. During the 1990s, it was “an explosion” when “seemingly everyone” discovered ballroom at the same time. Yet, she’s adamant that the exposure didn’t damage the community. “They persevered with or without the mainstream,” she says. Instead, this particular epoch wound up helping them “The world of fashion – which was also decimated by AIDS – had the idea to throw an AIDS benefit ball,” Chantal tells us. “This was the Love Ball, May 1989, with Susanne Bartsch and RuPaul, which I attended and photographed.” From then on, the benefit balls rapidly raised consciousness within the ballroom on how AIDS was affecting them. “The Gay Men’s Health Crisis created the Latex Ball in 1990 with the ballroom scene, because they needed it,” Chantal adds. “Ballroom was mostly Black and Hispanic and working class, and a lot of them were completely unaware of what was happening and treatment and protection.”

With such a wealth of knowledge, intelligence, and compassion on the LGBTQIA+ community, it’s hard to think Chantal simply started all this “because it was fun.” A simple trip to a ballroom she saw advertised in 1988 ended in a complete re-routing of her life, even when she left New York City to settle in Haiti in the mid-90s, just as ballroom was really taking off into mainstream stardom. She left with no idea just how important her role as the photographer had really been. “There was no photographer following it at the time. Now, everybody’s a photographer,” she quips. “Now, there are almost as many photographers as participants at the ball.” Even in the midst of providing a canny observation on the evolution of contemporary voguing, Chantal still manages to find time to bring it back to the very people this is all about: the ballroom community. “I know the mainstream looks at something at one point and they don’t look at it at another, but through it all, the culture will never die,” she says.