The Party Trick: Two Straws, Two Glasses, One Look at the Camera

There is a moment at every good party when the performance ends. The coats are still immaculate, the dresses still perfect — but somebody has stopped posing, and the real evening, the one everyone will actually remember, has begun. A photographer with nerve and a flash can catch that exact hinge. This one did.

The print is The Party Trick: a man in a dinner jacket and a woman in a white strapless evening dress, cheek to cheek, cropped tight by the camera, each of them sipping their own drink through a straw — two straws, two glasses — and all four eyes locked, unblinking, on the lens. Nobody is smiling for the photograph. They are too busy having the expression the photograph wanted.

Two straws, no posing

The straw is an unbeatable prop because it cannot be made elegant. Royalty cannot sip through a straw with dignity; nobody can. Put one in an evening dress and the whole apparatus of glamour is instantly, joyfully sabotaged — which is why candid party photographers have loved the gesture for as long as there have been parties worth crashing. Here the joke is doubled and synchronised: two people, side by side, performing the same undignified act at the same second, straight down the lens.

And the lens is the third character. The great party candid is never stolen; it is collaborated in. These two know exactly where the camera is — they are staring into it hard enough to bend it — and they have chosen, instead of composing themselves, to offer it the truth at maximum concentration. Hard flash, close crop, no background worth the name: the picture is all faces, straws and intent.

The flash-lit tradition

There is a whole honourable lineage behind this frame: the society photographers who worked the great parties with a flashbulb and no mercy, understanding that the evening’s real history is written in the unguarded minutes between the poses. Their pictures survived because they were funny and true at once. Posed glamour dates by the season; a raised eyebrow over a straw is permanent.

Black and white is the flash’s natural medium. It turns skin to marble, dresses to architecture and shadows to ink, and it strips the party of its colour-coded decade so that what remains is the behaviour — which, in this case, turns out to be entirely modern. Swap the film for a phone and this is last Saturday night. That is the trick the title means.

The clothes are doing half the comedy. A dinner jacket is the most regulated garment in menswear — its whole purpose is that nothing about it should surprise anyone — and a white evening dress is its formal answer. Set two people dressed for maximum ceremony to the minimum ceremony of drinking through straws, and the photograph gets its voltage from the short circuit. That is why it never dates: every generation has its own version of being overdressed and up to no good.

Living with it

Hang it where guests gather and formality goes to relax: a dining room, a home bar, a hallway on the way to both. It has the loosening effect of a first drink on a stiff room, and it pairs like a host with the wave’s other evening-dress candids. The poster sizes chart gives every size against a standard wall. Beside it, the red carpet couple supplies the arrival this party followed, and trouble in the limo supplies the journey home. Arrival, party, escape: a complete evening in three frames. It is, in short, the guest every wall wants.