THE ART OF ENJ OYING YOURSELF

At work they're up to their elbows in dead cow. After work, it's booze. The proof? These photos of the `Young British Artists' at play

Photographs of artists usually fall into one of two categories. The first are what you might call career shots, taken for professional purposes: the artists pictured in their studios, sometimes at work, more often not; grim-faced, immobile. The second are more glamourous, taken by celebrity photographers for the pages of glossy magazines, but equally posed and lacking in life. There have been plenty of the latter in recent years (most recently Damien Hirst in the current issue of Vanity Fair, shown lounging around the Groucho Club with two high-profile drinking buddies - Keith Allen, the actor, and Alex James, Blur's bass guitarist).

Occasionally, very occasionally, a third category of photograph comes along which captures something more elusive than a face or a place. These photographs may in themselves be unremarkable, but they are often more perceptive for being ordinary, unstaged documents of a particular moment in time. The legendary John Deacon did this in Soho in the 1950s with his photographs of Freud, Auerbach, Bacon and Andrews; and now, in an exhibition titled "True Brits", Johnnie Shand Kydd has done it for the new generation of artists who have come to prominence alongside Hirst.

Artists have always sought each other's company, and Deacon's photographs were the visual evidence of one of the most talented groupings in the history of British art. Taken individually, their names conjure memories of their paintings - one thinks of Bacon's popes or Freud's nudes - but recalled together as the School of London, it isn't so much the work that comes to mind as Deacon's grainy records of lunches at Wheeler's and drinks in the Colony Room: a collective identity bound by friendship and alcohol.

Shand Kydd would baulk at the comparison. Unlike Deacon he is not, he says, a photographer - just a man with a camera in the right place at the right time. He isn't even sure that he took all of them - but for all his humility he knows that his photographs, like Deacon's, are documentary evidence of a significant cultural moment.

It was a sense that something important was going on, unrecorded, that made Shand Kydd start. Initially he had grand plans for editing a book along the lines of Private View, Lord Snowdon's photographic account of the London art world in the Sixties - but time spent searching for the right photographers and negotiating with publishers was time in which the moment was passing. So, one night, the first of many, he put an Instamatic in his pocket and started doing the snapping himself. The results appear for the first time in these pages.

Undeniably, part of "True Brits" appeal is the voyeuristic thrill of glimpsing other lives (the same instinct that makes otherwise rational people open the pages of a magazine like Hello!). Hirst is there, of course (in mid-snog with his partner Maia Norman), as are the familiar faces of Allen, James and Kylie Minogue - but as the sculptor Gavin Turk points out: "[The photographs] are more like a documentary of Johnnie Shand Kydd's life than portraits of other people. He was at all these parties, but not as a photographer; he was there as a guest, which is probably why the photographs are so interesting. I've never thought of him as a photographer. It's more like it's his hobby."

At first glance it's a hobby that could be misread as a celebration of late-night luvviness. Captions like: "Kate Moss and Damien Hirst at Donatella Versace's Dinner for Madonna at the Ivy" are pure paparazzi; yet the pictures' cumulative effect is much more interesting.

Part of their mood is unashamed hedonism. It looks like one long party, the edges blurred where one night rolls into the next: "A macabre carnival,"as the writer Gregor Muir describes it, "marauding across town." Not all of these artists are friends, of course - in such a highly competitive world there are bound to be tensions; none the less they are often perceived to have a common identity. Overseas they get thrown together under nationalistic banners such as "Brilliant! Art From London" (an American show from 1995); back home the "YBA" acronym is too often used as a blanket description for a generation of young British artists whose work has little or nothing in common and whose only real link is the life they lead outside the studio.

Shand Kydd was tempted to title his show "YBA [Why Be a] Lush?" in acknowledgement of the role played by alcohol in these photographs and in the taking of them; but as Gregor Muir is quick to add this is only part of the story: "It may look like a strange and distant planet of party-goers, but the reality is that these artists work very, very hard ... then they meet up and get plastered."

Most of Shand Kydd's subjects are used to being photographed, but not quite like this. "It's terrible,"according to Sam Taylor Wood, whose own photographs of disjointed worlds are currently much in demand. "You're not really aware that Johnnie is there. I mean, you know that he's there because he's always around, but you get so used to him always having a camera, that you're not aware of it until the next morning when the phone rings and it's his voice saying 'Have I got a picture of you!', and then you have to meet him for a coffee and try to get it out of him."

One of the best and most blackmail-worthy of these photographs shows Gary Hume and Cerith Wyn Evans upstairs at The French House in Soho. It's a picture of two friends - one gay, one straight - both drunk. The gay one has a lovebite on his neck, given by a girl, another artist, another friend, at yet another party a few days earlier. Above their heads hangs a photograph of Frank Auerbach, Francis Bacon, Michael Andrews and Lucian Freud, taken by John Deacon round the corner at Wheeler's 40 years earlier. This is a haunting image that both captures the present and swings back to the past - and which suggests that, despite his protestations of amateurism, there's more to Shand Kydd's photographs than just a talent for staying up late with his friends.

! `True Brits: Photographs of the Art World, London 1996/97': Independent Art Space, SW3 (0171 259 9232), 6 to 22 Mar.