Along the winding banks of the Hudson River, and in the heart of the small town of Poughkeepsie, geography soon becomes a state of mind, an emotional landscape and a refuge suspended in time. Living in these places, especially when you are a teenager, means coming to terms with a summer that seems to never end, spent between the lazy pace of the American province and the wait for a future that elsewhere pulsates frantically. It is an existence made up of endless afternoons, silences interrupted by the hum of a rope swing and, above all, a constant call to the water. For the young people who populate this valley, the Watering Hole along Wappinger Creek is not only a physical place, but a microcosm of salvation and sharing, a liminal space where the weight of reality is diluted in the freshness of the current and where life flows following an ancient rhythm. Natural.
“Every photograph begins with a relationship. Some last years, others an afternoon. Each picture starts with a conversation and a simple ask: if I can make a photograph.” [Caleb Stein]
It is exactly within this geographical and psychological perimeter that Caleb Stein’s photographic work, Down by the Hudson, is inserted. At first glance, the British photographer’s black-and-white project might seem like an exercise in classic reportage, a visual diary of proximity based on friendship and the simplicity of everyday gestures. However, Stein’s work soon reveals a profound structural and conceptual complexity, transforming itself into an articulated meditation on water, America, identity and memory. The work starts from elementary but universal considerations: water as a constitutive element of the planet and of our own bodies, as a primary and fragile resource around which the struggles of the future will be played. But also as an existential metaphor, capable of recalling David Foster Wallace’s admonitions on the need to pay attention to the most obvious and invisible realities of our daily lives. In Stein’s photographs, water becomes a real skin that young bodies wear in a sort of fluid and musical choreography. An element in which the gravity and stress of life at this time dissolve, temporarily, to make room for a form of respite and purification.
This close dialogue with the territory, and with American history, finds an immediate confirmation in the silent but present comparison with the nineteenth-century Hudson River School and painters such as Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Edwin Church. If these artists sought the sublime in the uncontaminated and silent grandeur of natural landscapes, Stein’s vision makes a radical and significant twist. The author shifts his gaze from the uninhabited vastness of the landscape to the centrality of the human figure, inserting the bodies, existences and lived complexity of his protagonists within the same scenario. His camera does not reduce nature to a passive background, but elects it as the theater of a sociological and intimate investigation of modern America, the concept of frontier and the sense of belonging. It is an investigation that shuns the rhetoric of post-industrial decline or the gloom of contemporary news, preferring to focus on what resists, on what is renewed and on the ordinary grace of a humanity caught in its vulnerability.
“It is a subject (Caleb Stein) has explored for over ten years, having sporadically lived in Poughkeepsie for much of that time, and it remains his overarching quest, informing his body of his work, Down by the Hudson. However, where Cole or Bierstadt privileged the silence of their ‘scapes, Stein focuses on the figure in that ‘scape – now seen up close – emphasising human experience, occupation and our lived complexity. A figural determination that doesn’t reject the dynamic of The Hudson School and its take on landscape painting, but certainly offers a quiet, telling complication of it. One presents space as a trophy to be won; the other as the charge that both resists yet confirms its occupation.”
[Matt Carey Williams]
The layering of the work is enriched by the way Stein deconstructs the clichés of masculinity. Far from any voyeurism or sexual charge, the photographer’s gaze rests on the local boys — portrayed in fraternal embraces, in moments of playful struggle or in abandoned glances — highlighting an innate fragility and tenderness that emerge thanks to the protection offered by water. In this common space, where everyone is the same but irreducibly different, masculinity loses its dominant and aggressive component to become fluid, a mirror of an adolescence poised between self-affirmation and the need for comfort. Comparison. Alongside this psychological dimension, a subtle but powerful baptismal and sacred iconography transpires from Stein’s images: immersed bodies, hands joined in prayer, the details of necklaces with crucifixes or Marian tattoos transform the stream into a modern secular Jordan, a place of ablution, revelation. Maybe salvation.
The value of Down by the Hudson lies precisely in its ability to become a visual diary and at the same time a universal parable. The result of a decade of permanence, listening and a profound methodological dedication, Caleb Stein’s work reminds us, through the words of the author himself and the critical contributions that accompany the volume, that looking closely enough at an apparently ordinary corner of the world is equivalent to an act of faith. By remaining faithful to a place, frequenting it over the seasons and accepting mutual exchange with its inhabitants, Stein succeeds in transforming the particular into the universal, demonstrating that photography, before being documentation, is a profound way to learn to see, to inhabit the present and to exchange second-hand myths with the indispensable truth of lived experience.
“A series of wood steps is nailed into the three trees at the center of the watering hole. People climb them, take hold of the rope swing, jump. Some do backflips. Some flop. Some keep it functional, swing once, get in quickly. Some people egg the jumper on, some yell warnings about going off too high, but everyone stops to watch.Everyone there is also breaking the law. The outskirts are littered with No Trespassing signs, and some days the sheriff’s cars are parked at the entrance and nobody swims at all. I swam there this summer, on a day the space wasn’t blocked off, and gave my friend Nate a copy of the book. We looked at it together, then at the creek: trees that have moved downstream since the pictures were made, and the wood steps, which the three trees have been slowly closing over. I have gone back several hundred times across a third of my life. Say a word enough times and it stops being a word and becomes a sound. The creek has done that. What I know about it now is not clearer, it is more particular: the position of a fallen tree, how cold it is in May, when people first get in, which steps have gone soft, the resilience and ingenuity of the trees’ exposed root systems on the eroding banks of the creek, what the water looks like in a rainstorm, what people do when it starts.”
