Vinca Petersen is a British photographer and artist. Her photography book No System documents her life in the 1990s travelling around Europe with sound systems, putting on free parties. Her pictures began as a visual diary, documenting her leaving home at seventeen, moving into a London squat and becoming involved in the free party scene that grew across Europe in the 1990s. In the UK, free parties grew out of the rave explosion of 1989 when crowds of up to twenty-five thousand people would gather in the English countryside for illegal all-night events fuelled by MDMA and techno music. Petersen had become involved in this scene while still in her teens in London. They wandered through France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, the Netherlands and Germany, banding together with other sound systems to put on huge parties in remote countryside locations in the summer, then separating to seek out smaller, more urban venues, such as empty warehouses, when the weather got colder. The resulting pictures are intimate and warm, celebrating the travellers without romanticizing them. Petersen shows the damage as well as the highs of drug use, the litter and destruction the travellers left, as well as the euphoria of their parties. 

This is a mood board of my favourite pictures from Vinca Petersen’s book ‘No System’. To me they document a lot of information from her travels around Europe, for example their party habits and waking up the next morning feeling rough and repeating it everyday for years. The journal entries provide information on how she was feeling and documenting what has happened that night or day which I find intriguing because it is a completely different life as they don’t have any rules where they are and completely free, compared to the party and rave scene now where you don’t hear much about illegal parties and raves in the countryside.

In an article written by Sheryl Garrat she says “The travellers played what Petersen describes as a constant game of cat and mouse with the police. As a result, they were wary of outsiders, especially those taking pictures.” This shows Vinca Petersen’s passion for photography as she was willing to get in trouble from her fellow travellers for taking images of their lives and parties. The article also states how Petersen’s images “have been taken by an insider. Working with small, inconspicuous cameras, she sometimes didn’t even look through the viewfinder before clicking the shutter; other times she’d leave a camera on a bar overnight and retrieve it in the morning to see what had been recorded.”

I chose to analyse this image of two men at a DJ stand because it shows the life they were living while they were travelling. The DJ stand being covered by different materials shows the little/no money that they had within their travelling lifestyle as they had little money to afford proper shelter and they probably moved to a different location after this day. This image was taken during the day because it has natural lighting and no artificial lighting as she is a documentary photographer and it was taken in somewhere like a forest or countryside as they only went to remote locations, otherwise they could easily get caught by the police. This image doesn’t romanticize the travelling and party lifestyle as it doesn’t make it look appealing, the image looks dirty and rough but also free. The main feeling that is presented in Vinca Petersen’s book ‘No System’ is freedom, it is shown all throughout the book and I can see it a lot in this image with the countryside background and knowing the backstory and facts about the book it makes me see it even more.

I have chosen to analyse this image of a person asleep in a countryside field because it represents the freedom and euphoria that they experienced while they were travelling around Europe with their sound systems drinking alcohol and taking drugs. This could either be an aftermath of a night that they had or just someone relaxing in a field of tranquillity. The image shows little about what has happened to lead up to it, but knowing that the book is set on them travelling and partying around Europe you can add up what the story of this image is.