Jo Sittenfeld: Camp
Thursday, May 22, 2008
L: Cabin Wall, 2007 R: Hammock Accident, 2003 (from “Camp”)
© Jo Sittenfeld
Each month, the PRC exhibits a photographer’s work online as a part of Northeast Exposure Online. May’s featured photographer was Jo Sittenfeld, an MFA candidate at RISD. I was particularly interested in Jo’s photographs of children at Killooleet, a small traditional, coed camp located in my home state of Vermont, where she has worked for nine summers. From her project statement:
Killooleet is located in a narrow valley in the Green Mountains of Vermont and is comprised of a manmade lake, a main house with a wrap-around porch, a horse barn, and ten non-winterized red cabins. The campers grow up and move on, but the details never change – potted red geraniums on the dining porch windowsills, ham and potatoes for Wednesday supper, and rutted mud puddles down the center of camp created by 100 campers on bikes. Killooleet is familiar and specific. There is the smell of campfire in dirty hair or of a soggy bathing suit hanging in the cabin rafters. There’s also the sound of heavy rain hitting a tin cabin roof or of 130 people belting out the song “Goodnight, Irene.”
Camp is a brief, intense experience filled with change and growth and youthful energy, yet it all transpires on land that is unchanged year after year. This series is about the evolving group of adolescents who come each summer. It is also about the passage of time in a place that remains the same as its inhabitants come and go.
See more of Jo’s work on her website.
