Live Concert Photography: Smoke Season with Valise and The Last Year at Rough Trade 7/28/15

Live Concert Photography: Smoke Season with Valise and The Last Year at Rough Trade 7/28/15

I’ve been adhering to social distancing guidelines and quarantines as much as humanly possible over the past almost five months. My time in the outside world has been fairly limited these days to the usual errands — the supermarket, the pharmacy, and the post office, the occasional long walk for fresh air, exercise and to take photos. I’ve also gone out a small handful of times for outdoor drinks and meals. But for the most part, most of my time has been focused on work.

Over the course of this site’s ten year history, I’ve managed to develop a deep archive of unedited photos. Throughout much of this site’s history, I’ve balanced my work with JOVM with working full-time, corporate jobs in book publishing as an Editorial Assistant and Acquisitions Editor. So my daily life involved at least two hours of commuting back and forth a day; eight hours of work a day; then commuting to a show maybe three or four days a week depending on the week and what I had going on for work. Add actually working on the blog and maybe occasionally wanting a social and romantic life and sometimes there just wasn’t enough time in my day to do everything I needed or wanted to do. Because of COVID-19 lockdowns and limited options, I have nothing but time, so there are a lot of late night photo editing sessions.

Sadly, much of this work going through photos has managed to be an uncomfortable reminder of the some of the things I’ve loved so much — and won’t get back for the foreseeable future, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and the fucking idiots, who won’t put something on their goddamn faces. So one more time, in case you didn’t understand: PUT SOMETHING OVER YOUR FUCKING FACE WHEN YOU GO OUTSIDE TO PREVENT THE SPREAD OF COVID-19!

So some of this work lately has involved going through photos I’ve taken back in 2015-2016-2017 or so. And it’s been a trip and a half to see how some of my shots have improved through the years — plus all of those shows, man. So back in 2015 I caught Smoke Season with Valise and The Last Year at Rough Trade. Check out photos from the show below.

Smoke Season