{"id":43689,"date":"2021-07-05T11:30:00","date_gmt":"2021-07-05T15:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/?p=43689"},"modified":"2021-07-06T14:17:37","modified_gmt":"2021-07-06T18:17:37","slug":"woman-of-interest-laura-june-kirsch-romantic-lowlife-fantasies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/woman-of-interest-laura-june-kirsch-romantic-lowlife-fantasies\/","title":{"rendered":"WOMAN OF INTEREST: Laura June Kirsch Captures a Specific Era of NYC Nightlife with Romantic Lowlife Fantasies"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Photo Credit: Victoria Stevens<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t know anybody like the people I met in my 20s growing up,\u201d says Laura June Kirsch<\/a>. This statement neatly sums up Kirsch\u2019s oeuvre of work, the irony being that her photographs capture anything but neatness. A consistent fixture in NYC nightlife for the better part of the 21st century, the photographer and writer has documented the city\u2019s ever-evolving culture through the lens of shows and parties. She captured a very specific spot of time – the Brooklyn music scene in the post-Recession Obama years – and in doing so, carved a niche for herself as a young female photographer in an otherwise male-dominated field. She\u2019s preparing for the release of her first book, Romantic Lowlife Fantasies: Emerging Adults in the Age of Hope<\/a><\/em>, on Hat & Beard Press this fall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The photo retrospective aims to articulate the concept of \u201cemerging adulthood\u201d as it pertains to the millennial lifestyle. The phrase began to pop up, according to Kirsch, in the late ’90s and early 2000s, as a way to comprehend the growing trend of delaying the traditional milestones of adulthood – getting married, having a family, buying a house. \u201cAround the turn of the century, people started doing different stuff in their twenties,\u201d Kirsch explains. \u201cThey weren\u2019t getting married, they weren\u2019t sticking to one job, there started to be this second adolescence.\u201d As any millennial knows, these delays are fraught with nuance. We came of age in an era of endless war and economic crises, high interest student loans and the impending doom of climate change. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Cover<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Kirsch manages to get right to the heart of this subterranean angst with her photography. One image that stands out<\/a> in particular is a girl wearing a purple bob hairdo and Doc Martens tucked in the corner of a party, clutching a desperate (and presumably cheap) can of Budweiser while she sobs. She says she wanted to capture the unique moment of the Recession, \u201cwhat that was like, being a grown up trying to get by in a world where there was no opportunity,\u201d because with the weight of this type of economic uncertainty comes an unexpected freedom – if there are no jobs, who\u2019s to say you can\u2019t start that band, or open that music venue with your friends? Her photos bring to life an era of NYC nightlife that\u2019s been lost to the skyrocketing cost of living in neighborhoods like Williamsburg, where iconic venues like Glasslands, 285 Kent and Death By Audio fell victim to corporate development. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThe scene we were in was a very special moment in time, and I think we all kind of knew that, catching a little bit of magic in the Brooklyn music community right after the economy crashed,\u201d she says. \u201cThere was just a great artistic community we were all part of, and it was really fun.\u201d She notes another important nuance of this time period – no smartphones. \u201cThis was the last time before everyone became completely glued to their phones constantly. So this was the last era of that real, uninterrupted human connection.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Photo by Laura June Kirsch<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

It comes through in the photographs. She sets herself apart from a sea of concert photographers with her images of the crowd – couples embrace for what could be the first, or hundredth, time; friends dance into the early morning hours on what might be a Tuesday, ready to head to their underpaid \u201ccreative\u201d 9-to-5s in just a few hours more. \u201cI shot a lot of live music, but I was more interested in the people who were there,\u201d she explains. \u201cI had this great collection of pictures and I realized it was really just about millennials, and what lifestyle was like at this time, and what life looked like in these communities.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A \u201cgreat collection\u201d is an understatement, as she goes on to say that Romantic Lowlife Fantasies<\/em> is literally bursting at the seams: \u201cI just had a big conversation with how page count works when you\u2019re printing a photo book and we are out of pages.\u201d Kirsch describes the book as a longstanding goal, \u201ca labor of love,\u201d something she aspired to ever since her early photography classes in high school. She\u2019s been shooting this collection since 2008, beginning to sift through the content and piece it together in 2016. She began pitching it in 2018, and found Hat & Beard Press somewhere along the way. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Photo by Laura June Kirsch<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

In addition to the photographs, the book will contain original essays from influential figures of that era, among them Darlene \u201cDee Nasty\u201d Demorizi, Allyson Toy, Brooke Burt, Caitlin McCarry, and Jessica Amodeo. \u201cThey just tell their stories,\u201d she explains. \u201cI wanted a bunch of female writers to write about their experiences working in male dominated fields at the time.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is a theme that pervades much of the book, and Kirsch\u2019s work in general. In the late-aughts era when she cut her teeth as an events photographer, there weren\u2019t a lot of women out there with her. Surely it wouldn\u2019t be a stretch to suggest that her unique perspective as a female photographer at this time is what allowed her to find the layers of emotional complexity that emerge from her photographs. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Photo by Laura June Kirsch<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The future of NYC nightlife remains uncertain, battered as it were by the pandemic. The problems that underscore much of Kirsch\u2019s photography remain problems, some of them worse. But it\u2019s because of artists like Kirsch, ones that capture a bit of magic for us to look back on, that we find the hope that maybe, just maybe, history will live up to the adage and repeat itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Follow Laura June Kirsch on Instagram<\/a> for ongoing updates.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cI didn\u2019t know anybody like the people I met in my 20s growing up,\u201d says Laura June Kirsch. This statement neatly sums up Kirsch\u2019s oeuvre of work, the irony being that her photographs capture anything but neatness. A consistent fixture in NYC nightlife for the better part of the 21st century, the photographer and writer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":69,"featured_media":43684,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[573,305,5572],"tags":[12372,1105],"acf":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/07\/LauraJune7987-e1625585864942.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43689"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/69"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43689"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43689\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":43714,"href":"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43689\/revisions\/43714"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/43684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43689"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43689"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43689"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}