I have always photographed architecture in an informal, vernacular sense, from neon signs to football grounds. But when the subject of the private associations, clubs and libraries of New York City was presented as an opportunity, I soon found out that they had never been documented in any consistent fashion. I took this as a challenge and, almost immediately, came to realise that these supposedly stuffy, formal places were as idiosyncratically fascinating as anything I might encounter along the side of the road.
Some of the clubs depicted here are formed around birthright, old school ties and that enduring trinity: gender, religious affiliation and sport. Others focus on dogs, first editions of books and stamps or derring-do in faraway places. There are associations for people in the arts, letters and the law and private libraries for quiet research and tasteful cultural events.
The original clubs were semi-sober places for young well-to-do men, freshly moved to Gotham and on the way up, to congregate and network in the mid-19th century. Their female counterparts were formed at the turn of the 20th century. The Cosmopolitan, one of the earliest, counted Eleanor Roosevelt, the writers Pearl Buck and Willa Cather, and anthropologist Margaret Mead among its members. Bowing, often reluctantly, to social pressure and legal decree, today only two large clubs fail to admit women. The rest reflect current mores and the inadequacies of metropolitan institutions across the board: overwhelmingly white in a city that is less than 50 per cent so, with an African-American population a quarter of the whole.