**_Disappear_** _- to become lost or go missing/to cease to be visible or exist._
**_Here_** _- in, at, or to this place or position._
_“I like being taken out of my world,”_ photographer Kristin Gallegos tells me as we merge onto the rush-hour freeway after I pick her up from LAX. She has just returned from a work trip to New York, and our conversation begins, coincidentally, in a scene much like the opening of Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis, the novel from which the title of her current project was plucked. However, instead of the woes of the 80s youth generation and their meaningless luxuries, we’re here to talk about art.
‘Disappear Here,’ a phrase that haunts Ellis’ protagonist throughout the novel, is a four-part photo book series, each edition giving us a cinematic glance into an imagined day-in-the-life of a different female character, played by a different muse of the photographer. Shot entirely on film and limited to 100 copies per installment, the personas are loosely based real-life heroes of Kristin’s, movie characters, and sprinkled with some elements of her own life. Part one, released earlier this year, studied ‘The Dancer’: an homage to both Kristin’s love of cinema and her younger years spent in the ballet world.
The second installment, available November 22nd, invites us into the world of ‘The Writer,’ played by Emily Labowe. Inspired by literary idols of Kristin’s like Eve Babitz, Gloria Steinem, and, most prolifically, Joan Didion, it’s a pursuit to tell a story her way, absent of sentences or moving scenes like the books and films she was heavily immersed in during its conception but no less an exploration of the life behind the artist’s work.
We meet ‘The Writer’ in a 1970’s Laurel Canyon morning as she lays in bed reading and proceed to follow her through what feels like a day she may have lived identically countless times before. Kristin meticulously planned and created an entire world from the inside out, planting subtle hints at the relationships and emotions beyond the pages, upon which the viewer has the opportunity to imprint their own narrative. From the in-between moments of contemplation and focus to the familiar domestic acts of dressing and snacking, the thoughts and to-dos on post-it notes taken from pages of Didion’s ‘Play It As It Lays’ and the time appropriate glassware and coasters, every item carries with it an intentional clue into what this life might be like.
_“There's a lot of homages within my props in this one. I had plenty of time to obsess over and get very detailed with them. From Joan’s favorite drink and snack while writing to the exact belt worn by Jane Fonda in the 1970 film ‘Klute’ (another big aesthetic influence for the book) as well as the same book her character reads. These details act as anchors for me; A utility that exemplifies the importance of moving forward while crediting the matriarchs of the modern feminist movement.”_
She dreamed up this edition at the height of 2020’s pandemic and shot it in early 2021, a time when isolation, repetition, and a longing for the _old world_ reigned strongly over so many of us. It’s hard to imagine a time when collective escapism raged harder and was also easier to access. A universe of other worlds live in our pockets and beneath our fingertips, but it's the search to remain healthily attached to the ways of the past which keeps Kristin moving forward in the present. The theme of nostalgia is one that appears to linger over her in her everyday life as well as in her work. Her personal style, her home, the music she listens to, the film she shoots on all sing of notes of other eras, particularly the 60s and 70s, in harmony with her existence as a modern female creative.
_“I have always been enamored with the 60s and 70s. My parents raised me on the movies, tv shows, and music of that time. I just love the whole aesthetic of that era. And it was a time where everyone, despite their socio-economic background, dressed up every day. I am such a visual person, and it just really inspires me. It was also a revolutionary time. Things were rapidly changing, and so much was going on in the world. Most of my favorite artists, musicians, and writers were of that time.”_
California-born, New York affected, having spent most of her adult life living in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, Kristin’s background in fashion, as both a makeup artist and photographer, meant that producing ‘Disappear Here’ as a one-woman operation was not only doable but essential for its fulfillment.
_“I feel very much isolated in my own creativity when conceptualizing and especially with the way I work: I like to work alone. I’m capable of doing the makeup and hair and styling and sort of creating a whole universe for myself. I prefer it, being one on one with my muse. I feel like I’m in my own little world. To have full creative control and put out a product of exactly what I want to put out there, that’s the most rewarding. It’s a true representation of you.”_
As we sit in traffic, heading east, the realization hits that as roads continue to widen, billboards digitize and know your name, cars become better robots, and their drivers drift further from earth, the core values of both surviving in Los Angeles and the life of the artist are not that much changed from the decades past that serve as such strong influences to Kristin. Cars will still crash. Rent and bills will still dominate our to-dos. Inspiration will still ebb and flow of its own accord. The angle of the sun will still affect photos taken. Women will still fight for equal opportunity and for their work to be judged over their appearance or woman-ness.
It can be said that the process of most writers is, in fact, to process: to figure out what they think and feel by the act of writing, and Kristin’s pursuit of trying on the lives of other women through her work, women navigating their unique battles with power and struggle relative to their own pursuits and relationships is much the same.
_“I was reading so many books during the pandemic. Just as much as I was watching so many movies. Every day I'd make time to be alone to read. I feel like I'm a storyteller in my own way: visually, as I'm not a great writer. I think these books are reflections of myself, but also things I aspire to be. It’s been an opportunity to fantasize. If I were a writer, this is how I’d imagine that might look.”_
The photos stir up a sense of melancholy in the private moments we have been permitted to spy on. In the microcosms of The Writer’s movements as well as in the banal objects that surround her, every corner of every page whispers secrets of its history. We suspect we know this woman and the flaws and depression that lay just beneath her beauty. We know her routine, we know where her mind has wandered to, we know her desire to do well. We see women who are close to us and women we don’t fully understand. We see, perhaps, ourselves.
“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” Didion famously wrote, and, in an arguably historical time in which we are all emerging from our own tales of isolation, monotony, and sickness, it is with stories like this, the ones in which we can allow ourselves be taken out of our worlds, that daydreaming and escapism have never looked better.
.jpeg)
