Campers horse around inside B-15 during clean up

Campers from the 12s age group check the board outside the play house to find out who got what parts in the 12s production of Cinderella

A camper relaxes with counselors, enjoying watching his bunkmates play basketball during the afternoon free period

A counselor confronts a camper in front of his bunk mates, when he is caught with an extra candy bar from the weekly candy order, where campers may select one candy as an after dinner snack.

Campers socialize outside the phone booth hallway , after dinner. The line is usually quite long with a limited number of phones, and many campers use this time to talk,and gather before evening activity begins

A counselor sits with campers in The Main Area, as the campers play in a tournament chess game before dinner.

The Tattler Advisor (the camp newspaper) checks off campers as the enter The Rec Hall to vote in the camp elections for Camper Counsel

From the very beginning , since I first picked up a Nikon, I was told over and over that if I ever lose the fun and joy I get by taking photos, it was time to move on. When you hear this while in your early teens it has little meaning, and I guess now that I am still young at 23 it should not have that much meaning, but it does. More often than I would like my assignments seem to put me in harms way, often shooting the photos people seem to stare at but no one wants to see, and these images have begun to eat at me. Recently I have been trying to change gears, go more for the fun in life, the features, the story behind the simple things in life, no drama, no pain, no ones life is on the line, just simpler moments in life. Maybe I want to leave the big city and settle into a nice small daily paper in a rural or small suburban area.

Just when I needed the break, it came to me, like a photographic vacation handed down from the heavens. A local newspaper on Long Island I do some freelance work for was seeking summer features, possibly a summer camp. The assignment was not really mine, and I doubt I was the person they had in mind (I doubt what I shot is what they had in mind either). Immediately I thought of the sleep away summer camp in The Berkshires (Western Mass) I had spent a number of summers at as a camper, and worked at two summers on staff (photo counselor...what else?). This was just about the best assignment I have had in a long time. I started to think about the assignment as if I was 10 years old again, getting off the bus on that first day of camp not knowing where I was, or what was in front of me for the next two months. In my mind I was remembering what it is like to be a counselor there, and when I arrived at Camp Taconic all of my memories were gone, my mind and eye became a fresh slate (despite seeing my name painted in a few bunks, and carved into a stone). I was a new person, a fresh eye, an individual walking where I had walked many times before growing up. The surroundings were the same, many of the faces were as well (including a couple who's wedding I had attended when we were counselors together, they now have a beautiful daughter)

It is a rare thing to be able to go back to where you grew up and look at it as an outsider (It is an odd thing to have a counselor walk up to you and say "Hey Fish! You were my counselor!") New things come alive from the old. Looking at a campus that I knew like the inside of the viewfinder of a camera, I saw things I had never seen, and in ways I never imagined. I was at Camp Taconic with freedom to photograph at will, not as a camper who has to follow rules, or as a staff member who must photograph "happy pictures." This was the best, like a stranger in a familiar land, I was happy, I was free. I have always said that as long as I have a camera in my hand I am happy ,and while this is so, it is not always the joy and happiness I was able to feel deep down that I was facing with the challenge of photographing something as fun and simple as three days in the life of a summer camp over the 4th of July weekend. The challenge lays with finding a way to show how a sleepaway camp operates from dawn to dark, and starts all over again. The moments often missed by walking by and not looking. Moments happen everyday such as bleary eyed campers walking out of their bunk for breakfast, campers jumping on each other during clean up, maybe a camper relaxing in his counselors lap after a rough day, the familiar sight of a camper getting caught red handed with an "extra candy order" he swiped from a bunk mate, or socializing while waiting for the phones. These are things I witnessed every summer for a few summers, and again as a counselor, but never "saw" because I was not looking for these moments. There is such simplicity in these simple moments, but often unseen when you are involved in the scene.

I sit here looking at my images, editing my film, looking for the best photos, and I have to smile. The first time I have really had a big grin on my face while editing in a very long while. Why? Because I found the simple things in life that make me happy. Photographing everyday life, no drama, no pain, no ones life is at risk, this is the joy that was missing from picking up a lens to my eye day to day. The lens usually shields me from pain and suffering, like watching a movie, but with these negatives, there is no pain, no suffering, simply Three Days In The Life of Camp Taconic, remembering a simpler time in my life, simply captured by no longer simple eye.

Campers walk down the boys
line in the early morning to breakfast

Steven E. Frischling

News Photographer

steven@frischling.com

http://www.frischling.com/steven

© Steven E. Frischling, 1998