“Imagine Ernie Barnes’ Sugar Shack painting but as photographs with a focus on the club patrons seated facing the dance floor and you get a pretty good sense of Michael Abramson’s photographs from the South Side of Chicago in the mid 70s. A selection of these images are part of the HMAAC exhibition which takes its title from some of the South Side clubs where Abramson photographed.

The white male gaze can be implied in these images of black bodies in their cultural space but it would ignore the relationships that Abramson built in earnest over the weeks months and years he spent with the patrons of these clubs who granted him access. The result is an invaluable legacy of black joy expressed in images of people in black and queer spaces in the mid 70s.”