Dangerous Minds pal Rod Stanley sent me this item, from Dazed Digital, about photographer Ruth Bayer’s new self-published book of her pictures of people getting high on amyl nitrate, appropriately titled Poppers:

Dazed Digital: Why did you want to do this poppers project?
Ruth Bayer: I spent a couple years in San Francisco, and used to go to a lot of clubs. There was a fair amount of poppers use going on, and I became fascinated with the visual effect it had on the user. I decided to try to capture that. I started the project by photographing friends and acquaintances, but the majority of shots came from one Saturday night at a club called “Duckie”, at the Vauxhall Tavern in south London. The club organiser offered me a small room upstairs (the landlord’s bathroom, actually), which I turned into a studio. There was a constant stream of volunteers, and we could have carried on all night. Each shoot only lasted a minute or two.

DD: How did the room smell afterwards?
Ruth Bayer: Well it’s sold as ‘room odoriser’, and it certainly did that! It was a small bathroom. But I think I’d built-up a tolerance because people were coming in saying, “God, how can you breathe in here?” I’m glad no one lit a match, put it that way.

DD: What do you think is interesting about the visual effect of the drug?
Ruth Bayer: It makes people look very sexy – a lot of it is to do with the dilated eyes and increased sensual awareness the chemical causes.

Read the entire interview (includes gallery) at Dazed Digital