“I think I influenced myself.”

Christopher Makos believes in the moment, the slippery fish of now, wriggling in his hands before it can flop back into the abyss of memory. “It’s always about the moment,” he says, and you can hear the disco ball spinning in that sentence, hear the camera shutter clapping like a pair of drunk castanets. If Andy Warhol was the Pope of Pop, Makos was his mischievous altar boy, the one spiking the communion wine with glitter and gin. Warhol adored him—“always so much fun, so sweet, so great to travel with,” said a friend—and why wouldn’t he? Makos had the holy fool’s gift: to make glamour sweat, to make celebrity itch, to catch beauty with its eyeliner running. He once confessed: “I don’t like photographing people when they just lie there. It’s like having sex with somebody and they don’t do anything.” Makos needed movement, friction, the spark of complicity. He wasn’t interested in statues, he wanted saints mid-sin.

His show Party was said to “ooze sex, grime and glamour,” but that undersells it. His photographs don’t just ooze, they gush, they bleed confetti, they smell faintly of poppers and cheap champagne. He’s lived for four decades in the same West Village apartment, a haunted honeycomb where Tennessee Williams napped, Debbie Harry laughed, Tony Perkins smoked, Calvin Klein posed, and Roseanne Barr cracked jokes nobody remembers. “I’ve been here for 40 years,” he said, “and the only way I’m ever going to leave is when they park a casket in the hallway.” That apartment is his reliquary, a shrine to the holy trinity of excess: sex, laughter, and bad lighting. New York, he insists, “isn’t raunchy anymore,” but his photographs still are—sweaty Polaroid postcards from a city that once dressed like a saint but partied like a whore.

Makos doesn’t traffic in plans. He follows instinct like a bloodhound chasing perfume. “Creativity is something that you have to just be open to, and let the things emerge,” he says, sounding less like a photographer than a mystic with a Leica. His mantra: “Obey your instinct.” Expectations? Forget them. “I try not to have expectations… I have low expectations and then I’m really surprised because things turn out to be much more fun.” That’s Makos in a nutshell: lowering the bar until life can’t help but pole-vault it. Boxes? He smashed those too. “Everyone in the 70s and 80s was trying to get out of boxes,” he recalled. Today, the world demands neat definitions, sexual filing cabinets, hashtags and hyphens, but Makos finds all that “alienating.” He lived for fluidity, the blur, the undefinable moment when sweat and glitter erase the edges of everything.

Influence? He laughs. “I think I influenced myself.” But anyone who has looked at fashion photography in the last forty years knows that’s nonsense—his fingerprints are smudged all over it, sticky with nightclub sugar. His pictures remind us of youth’s miracle: “When we are young, the slightest amount of encouragement makes everything possible.” His camera was encouragement, a magic wand that turned nobodies into icons for a heartbeat, then back again before they knew what hit them.

And when you ask Makos what it all adds up to, he shrugs, devilish grin intact. “I had the best fun of anyone.” Which may be the truest legacy of all. Because in the end, Makos didn’t just photograph the party—he was the party, a one-man bacchanal with a Nikon for a chalice, forever baptizing us in the holy sweat of the moment.