Blue of Night takes you on quite a trip. The blurred and grainy images give an impressionistic take on an upmarket sex club, where only the women are members and men are invited at their discretion.

“There are so many literal photographs out there,” says Michael Grieve, who is no stranger to such illicit environs, having recently completed a long term project, No Love Lost, which takes in brothels, porn shoots and privately run sex parties. “This is something different.”

The club takes place once a month in a former embassy in central London, and Grieve first went there with journalist Charlotte Hunt-Grubbe on assignment for The Sunday Times Magazine, who commissioned him on the back of No Love Lost. The article was published early last year, but when Grieve decided to carry on shooting there, he abandoned any thoughts of an editorial-style story. Inspired by his hero, Daido Moriyama, and the Provoke photographers of early 1960s Japan, he remembered a comment from friend and fellow Agence Vu photographer, Jeffrey Silverthorne, who remarked,  “Everyone has a sex club in his own mind”.

“My heart sank the first time I walked in because it’s so dark, but it’s got better as I’ve gone along because I’ve become more free with that restriction,” he reveals. “I’m not photographing the reality of it. If I were to shoot it with a flash it would be much more harsh and cruel. I’m capturing the atmosphere of the place and using it as a vehicle to say what I want.”

The aesthetic is partly born of necessity anyhow. The owner of the club has given him her blessing, but the participants don’t know he’s taking photographs, so he shoots using a Contax T2 hidden in his pocket. He’s learned to adapt to these limitations, and even embrace them, averaging just a handful of useable shots from around three rolls of film per night.

“One night it went really well and I was able to shoot six rolls,” he says. “I was really excited but when I got the contact sheets nearly all of them were pure black. It doesn’t matter. I got key shots that night. That’s why the project is called the Blue of Night. It’s partly an appropriation of Georges Bataille’s Blue of Noon, which talks about sex and primitiveness in a very sophisticated way, but it’s also a reference to the light. If everything’s black there’s no hope, but if it’s blue something could come out.”

Grieve is still working on the project, and has already got a deal to publish it as a book. But with his second major work on a similar theme, one that some find problematic, he’s wary of being pigeonholed, and slightly impatient with it too. “Seeing me as the photographer who does sex is a very limited view,” he says. “It’s a small part of my work. We’re all sexual beings.”