“Masks, Fashion, Gender, Costume, Habit, Music, Job, Religion, Haircut – what defines your #identity and what makes you belong to a club?” tweeted the German artist Oliver Sieber around 2010.
Sieber’s tweet was part of his project Imaginary Club which was acquired by the V&A in 2024. The series consists of 432 photographs mounted on 349 boards in three different formats. It features half-length colour portraits of individuals from various countries as well as black-and-white-photographs in connection to the places where the portraits were taken. Imaginary Club was published as a book under the same title by publishers GwinZegal and BöhmKobayashi in 2013, including a ‘Twitter Encyclopedia’ and an image list. The series of photographs follows, with some minor exceptions, the same order as the book.
During my work at the V&A’s Photography Section, I catalogued Sieber’s series and identified key themes: identity, community, localisation and connectivity.
#identity
Sieber started Imaginary Club at a moment where he observed how Japanese subculture expanded into Europe and the US. He visited concerts or conventions over the course of eight years and photographed individuals connected to several subcultural movements, like Goth, Punk, Rockabilly, or Visual Kei. With Sieber’s tweet and philosopher Jean Baudrillard’s theory of hyperreality in mind, the question arises: To what extend do these portraits capture “real” individuals, or do they become representations of a larger, imagined subcultural identity?
#community
Subcultural studies have long examined the performative nature of subcultures, particularly through dress and appearance (see Dick Hebdige’s book Subculture: The Meaning of Style, 1979). Dress is therein seen as a “medium of quasi-linguistic communication” that can be decoded (Dunja Brill, Subverting Gender, Gendering Subculture, 2008).
The portraits sketch the range of the subcultural signs involved: combed back hair with a ponytail, make-up, piercings and jewelry or band-shirts. Though drawn from many different locations over time, Sieber’s series unites his subjects through their shared interests. The medium of photography plays an important role here: The club only comes together and finds a material form through the photographs. But how uniform or universal is that club? While bands travel, along with their styles, what role does the local context play in shaping these subcultures?
#localisation
From the hashtags and the Twitter Encyclopedia, a list of venues, bars, bands, movies or books can be compiled that connects to the black-and-white landscape photographs. The geographical range spans the USA (New York, Los Angeles), UK (Brighton and London), the Netherlands (Rotterdam), France (Arles, Paris), Germany (Düsseldorf, Leipzig, Cologne), Finland (Helsinki), China (Bejing) and Japan (Tokyo and Osaka). The cultural scientist Dunja Brill has underlined that subcultural studies don’t take into account the embodied practices involved, like knitting, styling or social interactions (see Brill 2008). Sieber’s photographs of streets, clubs or places are connected to the portraits, such as the portrait of Karas with green hair and a contrasting red beret in Beijing, thus aiming to give them this wider context.
Global studies have discussed the term ‘glocalization’ since the 1990s. Glocalisation means that the global and the local are not only intertwined, but mutually constitutive, meaning that as much as global trends shape you, they are also enmeshed in local traditions and vice versa. This becomes clear in the tweet above by Oliver Sieber in Beijing, China, in 2011. The Chinese rock and punk scene established itself in the underground and slowly build up at venues like Mao Livehouse referenced in Imaginary Club and visited by Karas. At the same time, punks challenged censorship and government restrictions being in place in 2011, hinted at in the tweet. The Beijing punk scene adapted global trends to local politics and social dynamics. Simultaneously, Chinese punk bands started to influence the global image of punk.
#connectivity
In addition to the connection between landscapes and portraits, photographs of photographs and tweets reflect the idea of how a club is formed. Imaginary Club contains several photographs of printed photographs: posters of famous actors or singers, such as James Dean or Lynda Carter, pop culture magazines, or advertisements. By photographing these images in public spaces like a bar, Sieber hints at their influence on (subcultural) expressions and identity. Mediated by both mass and niche media, images of James Dean’s iconic hairstyle serve for example as an inspiration to Rockabilly.
The connection between image and identity on a glocal scale is reflected in the Twitter Encyclopaedia, which forms the only textual context of the series. Sieber joined Twitter in 2006, the same year it was launched, sharing contextual thoughts during the series’ creation. Twitter introduced the ‘tweet’, limited to up to 140 characters, and popularised the hashtag, connecting groups and allowing real-time discussions. In this way, tweets served as meeting points for social interactions in the same way as venues, bars, and conventions in the background of Imaginary Club.
Imaginary Club therefore visualises a network of subcultures shaped as much by personal expression as by shared signs, places, and images. It asks us to consider how identity is influenced and mediated, but also where individuality ends and collective imagination begins.
