Get involved
An archive is only as alive as the people who build it.
AFTR/IMG is designed to be corrected and completed by the people who were actually in these rooms — dancers, DJs, promoters, door staff, photographers, and the crowds. Here is how to help, whether you have a memory, a means, or a mandate.
If you were there
Contribute
Submit a memory
A room, a night, a person, a record nobody wrote down. The first-person fragments are the whole point.
Add a memoryRecord an oral history
Were you on the floor at the Garage, under the dome at The Saint, in the Bronx in '73? Your account belongs in the record.
Tell usSuggest a correction
Dates, addresses, credits — old heads keep the record honest. Flag anything that looks wrong.
Flag itSustain the work
Friends of the Archive
A public cultural archive needs patient support, not advertising. Membership will keep AFTR/IMG independent and free to read. In development — nothing is charged yet.
- — Early access to Dispatches
- — Your name in the credits
- — Everything in Listener
- — Quarterly archive drops
- — A vote on what we document next
- — Everything in Member
- — Invitations to listening sessions
- — Named acknowledgment in the archive
Institutions & partners
Archives, libraries, universities, venues, estates, and photographers: AFTR/IMG is built to host and credit primary sources — flyers, photos, audio, oral histories. We're seeking collections to steward and partners to build with.
Start a conversationFunders
AFTR/IMG documents nightlife as cultural infrastructure — queer, Black, Latino, and immigrant history that is rarely archived while it happens. The data model carries explicit confidence flags and sourcing, and is built to scale from New York to other cities.
Read the mission & method- 159
- Rooms mapped
- 86
- Figures
- 18
- Parties & raves
- 5
- Boroughs
Growing with every contribution — spanning the 1920s to tonight.