Charcoal Book Club – December 2019
About the Book: Summer Camp by Mark Steinmetz
The campers are waiting and bored. They wear wristwatches and friendship bracelets. They are walking together on dirt roads, their hair, wet from swimming in the lake, now drying in the sun. They are eating corn on the cob and marshmallows cooked in the fire on sharpened sticks. They are alone in bed and together in bed, reading in bed, daydreaming in bed, eating candy in bed. They are sleeping on picnic tables, cleaning their cabins, playing chess on the floor in turf cleats. Children in motion and children in stillness, Summer Camp unfolds like a silent film.
“Kids experience things like morning and night differently at summer camp,” says Steinmetz. “At home they're insulated from the elements, they have television, and they have Coke cans in the refrigerator. At summer camp there’s not as much air conditioning.”
Summer Camp begins with pictures of school busses, it’s documentation of the prelude, the transition from domesticated childhood in a serious world of adult priorities, to a temporary never-never land of relative ferality amongst amusements and other children.
Once at camp the practical infrastructure of progress and comfort at all costs, is replaced with emblems of an intentional alternate reality - rustic cabins, sleeping bags, horses, flashlights, canoes, fishing poles. At Summer Camp it’s not quite the past, and it’s not quite the present.
Without affectation, the book captures all of the sensuous feelings and small details of summer spent outside: the humidity, the hot sun in the open at midday, the cool of a breezy porch in the shade of big trees; skinned knees, freckles, hair bleached by the sun; screened windows, dust pans and brooms (no vacuums at summer camp); also, ritual and dark reminders of the real world - costumes and campfires, a spooky drawing of a world war (big guns blazing, planes exploding), a large crucifix on the lawn by the lake.
The pictures were made between 1986 and 1997, but they feel as if they exist outside of time. They were made at many different camps: in Massachusetts; Wisconsin; Illinois; North Carolina; and Georgia, but somehow the consistency in tone and technique makes them seem as if they could have all been made at the same camp, maybe even during a single summer. The subjects are almost always photographed just as Steinmetz found them, and always in context - never staged or isolated against neutral backgrounds.
In general, Steinmetz is influenced by the work of Eugène Atget, Garry Winogrand, and Walker Evans, but for Summer Camp he was thinking specifically about Barbara Morgan’s summer camp photos from the 1950s (collected in the book Summer’s Children: A Photographic Cycle of Life at Camp), and the high school football photographs of Houston-based photographer Geoff Winningham. He says he also thought quite a bit about Peanuts comic strips by Charles M. Schulz.
Steinmetz often stayed at the camps while he was photographing - sometimes in the infirmary, once in a cabin with a creek running underneath (he heard gurgling water as he fell asleep). Often he was making pictures for the camp - for them to publish in their yearbooks or in marketing materials. He shot black and white film, usually with medium format cameras and sometimes with flash.
During this period Steinmetz generally photographed baseball players in spring, carnivals in fall, and camps in summer.
The book ends with another bus picture. Two older girls holding each other like lovers or sisters. It’s one of many pictures showing the bonds of affection that the campers develop for one another - holding hands, sitting close, becoming siblings, becoming a tribe.
Signed Copy
Hardcover with tip-in
10.5 x 12 inches
92 pages
80 duotone plates
