Life of the Partyrazzi: Maria Izaurralde, a.k.a. Maria Jpeg

It took only a few short months of shooting Washington nightlife before others began to refer to Maria Izaurralde by her self-appointed nickname, Maria Jpeg. Unpaid and until recently unaffiliated with any Web sites or blogs, she goes where she wants, and lately, that is where other photographers don't.

Washington parties are now teeming with photographers, but only Izaurralde was shooting the Rare Essence go-go show at Zanzibar in Southwest recently, and the recent hip-hop show at Almaz on U Street. As a result, people have come to know her work and accommodate her. (Once they stopped thinking she was a cop, anyway.)

Of the shooters profiled here, Izaurralde, an image manager at National Geographic, is the newcomer; she started uploading her photographs of Eighteenth Street Lounge and other scenes to Facebook only last fall. "As soon as I started taking pictures of people and tagging people is when I started getting feedback," she says. "I started to grow my network of friends."

Several weeks ago at ESL, a man approached Izaurralde about Sup DC, a local social networking site he was launching. He was looking for someone who went out a lot to help market it, and he wanted to know if she could help get it off the ground. Izaurralde came on board, bringing her photos (and friends) to the site. When her photos go up, the page views spike.

Izaurralde doesn't have the in-your-face style of Rice or Fine. At the hip-hop show, she fires off fakes, pretending to test her flash so her subjects aren't aware that they're being photographed. At Zanzibar, she shoots the band but hasn't yet begun to crack the crowd. She is not sure how the clubgoers will respond.

"Some people get upset" at nightlife photographers, she acknowledges, but should they? "You were out there anyway. No one is fabricating this. It's not like you were at home, hiding."