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Urbanautica: "Cruel Story of Youth" by Jennifer Loeber
The words and images proposed this week by Urbanautica for Manfrotto School of Xcellence are taken from the series 'Cruel Story of Youth' by Jennifer Loeber. The series is included in the show “The Youth Code!” curated by Nathalie Herschdorfer
at Daegu Photo Biennale, Korea running from 20 september 2012 through 28 october 2012. Jennifer Loeber (b.1973) was born and raised in New York City and received her BFA in photography from Massachusetts College of Art.
In 2007, I simultaneously photographed a series while filming documentary film called Fish Kill Flea, about a ragtag flea-market community housed within a dead mall in upstate New York. Spending over a year working on this project and getting know my subjects along with their overlapping personal entanglements and backstories got me thinking about my experience at a very unconventional summer camp I spent several years attending as a teenager.
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This series explores my personal reconciliation with the slowly fading memories that once had an indelible impact on my path to adulthood. I spent several weeks living with and documenting the emotional landscape of the current inhabitants of this camp that I attended as a teenager as part alumnus, part outsider. Connecting with my subjects through a shared history afforded me the trust necessary to be able to watch events unfold without censorship. Drawing from my own self-discovery within this same space, I focused on conveying the spontaneity and supportive atmosphere that is the foundation and legacy of the camp.
I‘ve always been interested in subcultures and fringe societies and began photographing within these themes during my undergraduate study so this body of work is definitely a continuation of those impulses. With this series, I wanted to examine both my own longstanding history with the camp as well as the idea that nostalgia can be a fluid, evolving sensation. I wasn’t just revisiting a place, but the emotional landscape of my former anxieties and vulnerabilities some fifteen years later.
www.urbanautica.com
www.jenniferloeber.com
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