Photographer Caleb Stein spent years swimming in the watering hole in Wappinger Creek before he made a single photograph. Prior to being an image maker, he was a long-distance swimmer—a ritual he still maintains long after competing came to an end—and the reason he found his way to the creek after his partner, Andrea Orejarena, discovered it. Once there, he became fascinated by the secret swim spot and the people who found their way to it, building relationships with a motley crew of strangers and newfound friends.
“The creek is a serious melting pot in the classic sense,” Stein explains. “It’s all of New York and every conceivable type of person all connected by the fact that we’re collectively breaking the rules by being there.” The creek is technically off-limits due to county restrictions, and yet, despite “No Trespassing” signs littering its perimeter, the gains of this spontaneous commons outweigh any risk for those seeking relief from the summer heat and the toil of everyday life.
“There is something in the fact that we’re all breaking the rules by being there,” he adds. “Everyone is united by their collective desire to find a space to come together and let their guard down. Even when the police come to clear everyone out, they’ll admit they bring their own families here too. It’s a unique space that somehow belongs to everyone and no one.”
Over time, the camera became part of Stein’s visits to the creek. First, documenting, and later reaching for something more poetic, a visual tribute to the freedom and Edenic sense of community that the place elicits. As trust grew, the process of making images became a collaborative gesture rooted in sociality. Some bonds span years, while others last an afternoon, but what is consistent for Stein is that “every photograph begins with a relationship.” It’s here, in a shared curiosity and desire to memorialize what the creek means to them individually and together, that the work begins. “I often think about all of the people that have gathered here over generations,” Stein says. “The people who have come here to rest, to heal and to fall in love. I wanted to make pictures where you can feel something about a person’s weather, and to explore how the space elicits a different set of behaviours in the people who go there.”
While the creek’s aura and offering drew Stein in, it was the unexpected observations about how masculinity shifts at the creek that kept him coming back. In his images of Skyler, Malikai, Fred and TaeShawn, we witness the water softening their energy, bravado giving way to tenderness. Throughout the series, masculinity is seen as a journey, mapping the transition from adolescence to adulthood. Together with his protagonists, they unpick the codes and tropes of masculinity in unexpected and nuanced ways. Take the image of Matthew, Jackson and Oden in a moment of casual synchronized swimming. A quiet, calm and reflective moment that sits in contradiction to the current portrayal of boyhood in the wider culture. Or the disarming image of Seamus in Embryo pose—taken a week after he lost his mother to a motorbike accident, and the same day Roe v Wade was overturned—where we witness his yearning for maternal comfort.
