The 80s, after dark.(photos excerpted from 'So80s: A Photographic Diary of a Decade' by Patrick McMullan)(Illustration)

Shuttling from the Palladium to the Temple of Dendur to Area, Patrick McMullan chronicled the decade of Tama Janowitz's big hair, Christian Lacroix's big skirts, and Ivan Boesky's big dive. Photos from his new book, So80s, show how revealing McMullan's little Canon Sure Shot could be

Photographs excerpted from So80s-A Photographic Diary of a Decade, by Patrick McMullan, to be published in October by Powerhouse Books; (c) 2003 by Patrick McMullan.

Every decade leaves behind its own glossary. The jumble of words and phrases that came out of the 1980s-"celebutante," "junk bond," "social X-ray," "rico," "the rough-sex defense," "crack," "garbage barge," and "blackened redfish," to name a few-provides a pretty good picture of the era's mood swings, its preoccupation with high and low, uptown and downtown, drag queens and buyout kings. But the decade came into its full glory only after eight p.m. In New York City during that time, one would be hard put to say whether more styling mousse and sequins were on display in the clubs below 14th Street or in the dining rooms of upper Park Avenue. Patrick McMullan, whose photographs of the period's nightlife will be published next month in the book So80s (Powerhouse), might be the guy to ask. He spent virtually every evening of the decade at parties, zipping back and forth between the Temple of Dendur and places such as Area, the club that did itself over with different homemade installations every month or so, well before Martha Stewart made the glue gun a standard household appliance.

The 80s club world viewed itself as an edgy, even subversive subculture (rubber dresses! a party invitation made of Velveeta! midgets!), a kind of critique of the ostentatious but dull pageantry of big money everywhere else in the city. But more than a critical response, downtown functioned as a kind of fun-house mirror for the rest of Manhattan. Downtown had trust-fund kids in drag; uptown had former stewardesses in Christian Lacroix poufs. Was Tama Janowitz's teased hair really any weirder than Mike Milken's toupee? And the self-conscious transgressiveness of the coed bathroom at Area seems almost quaint compared with the courtroom spectacle of Ivan Boesky and Dennis Levine being led away in handcuffs and monogrammed shirts.

By the time the 80s got rolling, Patrick McMullan was already something of a veteran. When he was a kid growing up on Long Island in the 60s, his parents threw a lot of parties. Themes were often involved; there were Roman-toga parties, hippie parties, and-a particular favorite-luaus. The McMullan children were supposed to be upstairs asleep during these events, but Patrick would peek out his bedroom window at the grown-ups in the backyard, shimmying around a rowboat full of cold beers, and he'd grab a little Instamatic camera (the kind with a revolving flashcube on top, no doubt), run outside in his pajamas, and take pictures.

That could be why McMullan likes to refer to himself as a Bar Mitzvah photographer, as opposed to a member of the paparazzi. He claims that he didn't see La Dolce Vita until he was in his 30s, and he's never used a long lens or stood outside a party waiting for celebrities. "I'm always a guest first," he says. Think of him as an early embedded journalist.

He still uses the smallest camera he can find, a lesson he learned from Andy Warhol: "Andy always said, 'As a cute kid, you can get into these parties, but if you have a big camera around your neck, they're gonna make you stay outside.'" When I met McMullan, in 1986, he was taking pictures for ...