On any given night, a few thousand photos are snapped inside one of Toronto's clubs. Packs of friends bring their own digital cameras. Professional or semi-professional photographers move from venue to venue, party to party. And other clubs employ their own staff photographers to shoot the action and make their place and its patrons look beautiful. But that massive amount of documentation is also inherently limited: the clubs are rarely captured dormant or off-guard, never shown absent of people or activity. So for In Praise of Shadows, Ryerson photography student Eugen Sakhnenko fought and obtained permission from three different clubs in different areas of the city—Embassy Night Club (117 Peter Street), Loki Lounge (577 King Street West), and Baby Huey (70 Ossington Avenue)—and shot them vacant of almost everything save for light to, as he told Torontoist, "[shine] the light into the shadows, both physically and metaphorically, to show what these spaces really are."

Newsstand: November 9, 2009