Shanay Jhaveri’s latest book, Night Fever: Film and Photography After Dark, focuses on the nighttime hours and their multiple associations. For the book, Jhaveri – the new Head of Visual Arts at the Barbican Centre in London – has compiled essays, film stills, and photography portfolios by artists including David Goldblatt, Paz Errázuriz, Sohrab Hura, Ming Smith, and Tobias Zielony into an evocative homage to the night.

Below, Jhaveri discusses a work from the book: Ming Smith’s electric 1978 photograph of the performer Grace Jones at Studio 54 in New York:

‘Night Fever focuses on multiple embodied experiences of the night, and how nighttime can have different frequencies and tenors for different people. When assembling the book, I looked to artists, filmmakers, and photographers who had found themselves drawn to working at night – or, as I call them in my introduction, nightwalkers.

Ming Smith’s iconic photograph of Grace Jones at Studio 54 captures not only a glamorous person, but also a mood, a sensation. It’s an emphatic and strong image of unabashed confidence and beauty.

With her incredibly large hat, Jones fills the entire frame, and we get a clear sense of Smith’s proximity to her subject. I am drawn to the directness of this encounter and the engagement between the two women – their friendship. Smith has explored the night in various registers, including taking photographs of performers and musicians. She also made a series of astonishing multiple-exposure photographs, taken on the streets of New York.

The book is designed and sequenced in a way that makes readers feel as if they are on a journey through the night. By the time you encounter this image, you’ll have crossed many geographies and time periods, and had other experiences of the night shared with you. Smith’s photograph of Jones could be seen as something of a crescendo – a peak before the book, and of course the night, moves into another register.

Night Fever confirms that night is not the same for any person or group, and can be suffused with a range of different emotional and physical experiences. One of those is pure joy. For me, there is no better image that truly encapsulates this than the image of Grace Jones by Ming Smith.’