Down by the Hudson presents over a decade of summers Caleb Stein spent photographing a creek in Poughkeepsie, New York. Since 2013, Stein has returned to the same stretch of water each year, observing the recurring rhythms of friendship, gathering, and care that define this communal space. What began as documentation gradually became a lyrical and tender ode to the freedom and edenic sense of community the place elicits.
This project was awarded a Juror’s Pick in the LensCulture Black & White Awards 2020.
For the publication of the book, Daniel Wolff interviewed Caleb Stein about this work. This conversation took place near the watering hole where most of the images were made.
Daniel Wolff: So, where are we?
Caleb Stein: We’re at a watering hole along Wappinger Creek. There’s a drive-in movie theater on one side and an American Legion on the other—about as quintessentially U.S. as it gets. Families have been coming here for generations. Even when the police come to clear everyone out, they’ll admit they bring their own families here too. It’s one of those shared, half-secret places that keeps reappearing in people’s lives. It’s a space that somehow belongs to everyone and to no one.
And how did you find it?
Andrea introduced me to it. I began photographing in Poughkeepsie as soon as I moved there, but for a long time the pictures didn’t work. I grew up between New York and London, and my sense of small-town America came from Norman Rockwell, Grant Wood, and Life magazine. The camera became a way to trade second-hand myths for lived experience—to see how a place remakes itself when you return again and again. I realized that a single creek can open into a whole world if you stay with it long enough.
So the difference was between New York City and a smaller town?
Exactly. I had to learn to move at the pace of the place. In a small town you start to notice how light changes, who appears at certain hours, how sound carries across the water. Once you slow down, the most ordinary corner becomes layered, alive. The longer you look, the more it reveals itself.
It’s as if they know you very well. How did you build that kind of trust? Do they get a copy of the picture? What’s the process of photographing them like?
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. I show examples of the work and talk about the context it lives in, in exhibitions, articles, and the book form, since I always knew I wanted to make an artist book of this work. That part matters: it’s one thing to agree to a portrait and get a copy, but another to understand where the work might live. Sometimes I know people for a long time before photographing them; other times the encounter is quick and full of energy. I’m often fumbling in the water with my camera, trying not to drop it (it’s not waterproof ). That awkwardness levels things. It becomes part of the exchange. I share the files, sometimes prints. I don’t want to be too precious, and pictures can have multiple lives. Photography might even be best when it does. Working digitally lets me show the image on the screen in real time. Sometimes it’s just, “OK, great,” and they jump back in the water. People have even used portraits I made of them for their Tinder profiles, and I love that.
The picture of three boys lined up in the water by a tree—did you direct that?
I suggested it to Matthew, Jackson, and Oden at the creek, talked through what I was thinking, and then we tried it out. It reminded me of my brothers and the games we played. Around that time Andrea had shown me an Esther Williams film of synchronized swimmers; I’d never seen men do anything like that. I liked the idea of a playful inversion. That’s often what it’s like — imagining, talking, playing, trying things out together.
Everyone seems comfortable with you. Would you consider yourself a part of the community?
Yes. I feel a real sense of belonging and love for the place and the people in it. Belonging isn’t only about where you’re born. It can come from where you place your time and care. I started photographing here at nineteen and finished at thirty-one. That’s a third of my life. I often come here to rest. I was a long-distance swimmer as a kid, and I still go here to swim. Being in the water is when I feel most at ease. I’ve swum here with friends, with my partner, and built friendships that have lasted a decade. I’ve seen kids grow up.
There’s a line from Édouard Glissant I return to: “I can change, through exchange.” That’s what this place taught me, that you change through proximity, through showing up over and over again.
When you show them these pictures, what do they say?
Usually they laugh, make jokes, or ask for prints. When they feel like it, they share their numbers and emails because they want the pictures. The watering hole centers on an island that the creek wraps around on both sides. Every winter I go back, when the place is empty and everything’s covered in snow and ice. I make my way to the island. It’s silent. I look at how it’s changed, at how the contours have shifted, which trees have fallen and drifted down- stream to become part of a beaver dam, how the ladder to the rope swing is holding up. I imagine how it’ll change when summer comes. I’ve done that every year for a decade.
You could have made equally sensual pictures of the women.
I was drawn to how the space worked on the men, to their energy softening as they settled into the water. Somehow it’s a place that allows bravado to give way to tenderness. I recognize it because I’ve felt it with my own friends. It’s a mix of strength and vulnerability. Wrestling becomes a way of being close, of showing care without words, and that ambiguity interests me.
Your edit avoids decay—no trash, no ruin.
Right. I’m not interested in showing grit that’s mostly absent from the space. We already know what’s broken. For me, the complexity lives elsewhere— in what the place brings out of people. Down by the Hudson is as much a psychological space as a physical one. I wanted to make pictures where you can feel something about a person’s weather. For some, being at the watering hole is their good day of the week, but outside the creek, on a different day, life can move differently. I wanted to see what endures, what renews itself. Over time my understanding of the place deepened, and it unfolded in ways I couldn’t have anticipated. Staying with it changed how I saw and what I could see.
If I had to name it, I’d say the work is a kind of diary of how I saw something. It’s in conversation with Walker Evans, Helen Levitt, Sam Contis, and William Gedney. It’s also a quiet reply to the Hudson River School, to those painters who showed the valley as vast and unpeopled, waiting to be possessed. The reality is more intricate: a lived place, full of stories, continuities, and change. I sometimes think about how many people have fallen in love here over the millennia. The creek has probably been flowing that long. That act of looking, of trying to see something clearly, is its own form of devotion.
We talked about the democratic vision these pictures have.
To me, democracy is something you can feel here. Everyone watches whoever’s about to go off the rope swing. It’s a performance. Often the first thing people ask me to photograph is their trick from the swing. Some yell encouragement, others say, “Be careful,” but everyone’s watching intently. It’s a particular kind of democracy. Maybe democracy begins there, in the act of looking together.
Well, in a way, that’s the whole basis of it: that people will be able to work things through one way or another. I hope it occurs beyond this one swimming hole.
I hope so too. Other creeks, other towns have their versions of this. Paying attention to one small space taught me something about how perception can grow and how the specific can hold the universal. That’s what I learned here: that looking closely enough is a kind of faith, that by staying with something long enough, you begin to see the world renewing itself.
