When Caleb Stein visits a certain swimming hole along Wappinger Creek, he often brings his camera. Whether he takes it out is another matter. “There’s a lot of time that was spent there that had nothing to do with photography, and that will continue,” he says. “It’s mainly to swim and to hang out, and then if something happens, it happens.”
Stein first arrived in Poughkeepsie as a Vassar student in 2013. He remained in the area after graduating, working at a restaurant, living for a year in the former Poughkeepsie Underwear Factory, and serving as an assistant to photographer Bruce Gilden—an experience he likens to “the photographic equivalent of being in the film Whiplash.”
Later, Stein moved to Hanoi with his partner and frequent collaborator, Andrea Orejarena. Yet he continued returning to Poughkeepsie in summer, revisiting the swimming hole that had become a constant in his life and work. The photographs he made there over more than a decade have now been collected in Down by the Hudson, a monograph published by Palo Press. An exhibition of the work will be on view at Palo Gallery in Manhattan from September 10 through October 3.
The project began with Stein’s sense that this patch of creek operated unlike any other place he knew. “It’s a much less intense place. It’s a more hopeful place,” he says. “It’s a space where incredibly different people are coming together, having an interaction with more respect and more patience and with a kind of slowness that I have not experienced elsewhere.”
The setting’s physical peculiarities contribute to its social character. At this point, Wappinger Creek becomes deep enough for swimming and wraps around a sandbank. Trees provide places to gather and launch oneself into the water. A drive-in theater stands on one side and an American Legion post on the other, faint reminders of the built environment that remain largely outside Stein’s frames.
The swimmers come from Poughkeepsie, LaGrange, Hyde Park, and farther afield, including the Bronx. That diversity gives the place what Stein calls “the dynamic vitality of an urban space,” even though the photographs contain few visible signs of city life.
His black-and-white images move between portraiture and near-abstraction. Boys wrestle or arrange themselves around trees. Friends embrace. Swimmers float in dark pools or disappear into reflections. Roots, limbs, hair, tattoos, and shifting light form a visual language in which bodies appear inseparable from the landscape.
Some pictures capture unfolding events; others emerge through direction and collaboration. Stein says the distinction is largely intuitive, although every photograph begins with a relationship. Before making a portrait, he shows his subjects previous work and explains the contexts in which the image might appear. “Sometimes it was very simple,” he says, “and other times it was more: Let’s talk and see where things go, and try things on for size.”
As the project accumulated, Stein recognized that many of its most affecting photographs depicted boys and men—wrestling, floating, touching, and looking after one another. He began to see the watering hole as a place where familiar performances of masculinity could loosen.
“Men appeared more transformed by being there,” he says. “They came in with more kind of bravado. And then something kind of softened.” The series, he realized, had become “a look at how this space works its magic on men.”
That magic could invite accusations of romanticization. Poughkeepsie is a postindustrial city marked by disinvestment and inequality, none of which is readily apparent in these Edenic scenes. Stein, who has photographed other aspects of the city and participated in local labor and migrant-rights activism, argues that this project has a different purpose. “To make a document of something that works is not to say there aren’t things that don’t work,” he says. “It’s a document of a good day, which I think we’re all kind of entitled to see.”
Time supplies the book’s underlying structure. Stein has watched boys he first photographed a decade ago enter college, become fathers, and make varsity teams. He has also watched wooden steps disappear into a growing tree and seen a storm wash away a fallen trunk that swimmers once used as a bench.
A curator visiting his studio suggested that the creek, more than any individual swimmer, was the work’s main character. That observation stayed with Stein. The site occupies only about 30 by 70 feet, yet hundreds of visits over more than a third of his life have caused his understanding of it to “widen or splinter.”
At 31, Stein does not consider his relationship with the creek finished. He returned this summer and brought his camera but made no photographs. He simply went swimming.
