For more than a decade, photographer Caleb Stein has returned to the same swimming hole along Wappinger Creek near Poughkeepsie. He first encountered it as a Vassar student in 2013. Since then, he has photographed its swimmers, watched children grow into adults, and seen storms and tree growth alter the creek itself.
The resulting body of work appears in Down by the Hudson, a new monograph from Palo Gallery Press. An accompanying exhibition runs September 10 through October 3 at Palo Gallery in Manhattan.
Stein was initially struck by how the swimming hole seemed to operate differently from other public spaces. People from Poughkeepsie, Hyde Park, LaGrange, and the Bronx gather there, forming a community around the water.
"It's a space where incredibly different people are coming together," he says, "having an interaction with more respect and more patience and with a kind of slowness that I have not experienced elsewhere."
That atmosphere is reflected in Stein's black-and-white photographs: boys wrestle, couples embrace, swimmers drift through dark water, and bodies intermingle with roots, leaves, and reflected light. Although the pictures can feel spontaneous, each begins with a conversation. Stein shows potential subjects, examples of his work, and explains where the images may appear. From there, the encounter might produce an immediate portrait or develop into something more collaborative.
Over time, Stein became especially interested in the swimming hole's effect on men. "They came in with more kind of bravado," he says. "And then something kind of softened." His photographs capture masculinity in flux, with strength, physical play, tenderness, and vulnerability existing within the same frame.
The book's lyrical treatment of the creek might seem to offer an idealized picture of life around Poughkeepsie. Stein sees it as a deliberately focused document of something that works.
"It's a document of a good day, which I think we're all kind of entitled to see," he says. "It doesn't mean that there aren't other sections of the city where people have figured out a way of getting some rest and healing in some way."
Stein still visits the creek, sometimes carrying his camera and sometimes simply swimming. After hundreds of visits spanning almost his entire adult life, he has come to regard the waterway itself as the project's central character: a small patch of terrain that remains recognizable while continually being remade.
