This Essay is part three of four and focuses on the clubs. Part one focused on the DJs and Part Two covered the Dancers and other performers.  Next week is the last of this series and will cover the Clubbers themselves.
I’ve decided I’m going to post a photo essay every week, and what better place to start than where I started my trip – Ibiza.
Ibiza is an island off the southern coast of Spain, 79 km away from the city of Valencia. It is a vacation destination for many, but is particularly popular with British families and clubbers worldwide. A main party destination, it’s said to have the biggest and best clubs in the world and draws electronic music enthusiasts from everywhere.
I chose Ibiza as my first working destination because of an experience I’d had in Ios, Greece 10 years earlier. The idea being that it was an island that required a ton of people to work during the summer, most of whom would be foreigners. I went expecting to tend bar, but ran into work permit issues and changed plans. Through the three weeks of networking I’d done trying to get the bartending gig, I found a job working as a photographer for a British website focusing on the clubs, which was stroke of good luck. I’d gone with a plan of hitting each of the big six clubs at least once, and ended up working the clubs 5-6 nights a week and running a team of four photographers scattered around the island.
Lasers fire around the lens looking at DJ Fakeblood playing at Eden's Reclaim the Dance Floor.
Hundreds of clubbers reach for the water as the hoses begin to turn the dance floor into a pool during Fiesta del Agua at Es Paradis.
Privelege is the biggest club in the world with a capacity of 10,000. During Radio One weekend, this was exceeded by quite a bit.
This isn't your standard DJ booth! The stage at privilege is huge and probably why Tiesto picked the place host his million-dollar light show on Monday nights.
The Ibiza Rocks stage is surrounded on all sides by the walls of a four-story hotel. Ever watch a rock concert from the balcony of your room?
Chilled air blasts the crowd in one of the six rooms at Space, my favorite of the big Six clubs on the island.
Of the two clubs in San Antoni, I prefer Eden over Es Paradis - probably because the place is so much more photogenic.
Space's Sunday night is simply called We Love Space and is one of the best nights on the island.
Eden hosts two nights I was very active at - Reclaim the Dance Floor on Tuesday nights (part of Ibiza Rocks) and Wonderland on Friday nights.
While not considered one of the big six venues, this abandoned zoo has three different pits playing music and draws a good sized crowd Saturdays.
Pasha is the most established of the major clubs, and draws more of a local crowd than the rest. The exception is David Guetta's F**k Me I'm Famous which brings the British in on Thursday Nights..
The laser light show at Pasha is great. Some nights they have a dancer in a dress covered in mirrors standing in just the right place to act as a human disco ball.
i am so going to these clubs. what time do they open and close?
Open and close times very by event and club, but generally speaking you’ll probably get to the club around midnight, it’ll peak between 2-3am and close between 5-8am. Headliners usually go on between 2 and 4 am.
-T
[…] following, Part one focused on the DJs, Part Two covered the Dancers and other performers, and Part Three gave you an idea of the clubs themselves.  These shots are of the clubbers and are the types of shots I was hired to get for the website I […]
Some awesome photos there mate!