Everyone Else’s Youth

I have two completely opposed feelings about American Spring Break. The first: do I really want to push my adequate-at-best body through a heaving mass of thousands of drunk college students while the sun takes a personal interest in damaging me and some DJ refuses to stop? The second: yes, absolutely, let’s go.

New York photographer Casey Kelbaugh made it to Miami without my ambivalence slowing him down. He embedded himself in it—the beer pong, the flexing, the smartphones held overhead at all times, an entire generation performing its own mythology in real time. The photographs that came out are exactly what you’d expect and somehow still interesting. Kelbaugh isn’t mocking his subjects. He watches them with something closer to patience.

What draws me to this kind of work is what it captures without trying to. The Spring Break photograph as a genre tends toward either condescension or celebration—Kelbaugh manages to be neither. His subjects look like themselves: not archetypes, not cautionary tales, just people in their early twenties who know how to have a good time and are having it, aggressively, in public. Beer pong as sincerely held belief system.

Kelbaugh’s other project, Slideluck, combines photography exhibitions with communal eating as a touring format—the kind of art infrastructure that’s more interesting than it sounds, and genuinely useful in a world where exhibitions tend to happen in rooms that feel like they’re punishing you for showing up. The Berlin stop, at the Delphi Filmpalast, carried that same impulse: art should happen somewhere you’d actually want to be.

Spring Break will keep happening. The photographs are the thing worth keeping.