In 1999, after my freshman year in college, I was a counselor at a camp in central Vermont. It changed my life.
For the next eight summers I kept going back. Camp was where I found my professional calling: Teaching kids to mold clay flowers by hand made me realize I wanted to spend the rest of my life making and teaching art. It was also where I came to understand core values. Somewhere in this outdoor summer utopia — a blend of vaguely Quaker ethos with a communist, hippie, artsy sensibility and a dash of Midwestern kindness — I found my people. It’s where I fell in love for the first time, with a soulful, charming boy who worked slinging oatmeal and scrubbing pots in the camp’s kitchen. It’s where I learned how to exist in community with others.
Although I was technically hired as a ceramics counselor, I also appointed myself the unofficial photographer of Camp Killooleet. Even back then, I knew I would grow up and move on, and I wanted to hold onto all of it: the potted red geraniums on the dining porch windowsills, the ham and potatoes for Wednesday supper, the rutted mud puddles down the grassy fields created by campers on bikes. I wanted to freeze the smell of campfire in dirty hair, of a soggy bathing suit hanging in the cabin rafters, of a kid who is too young to wear deodorant but needs it. Camp felt magical. And inherently fleeting. By photographing it, I wanted to save it forever.
I took photos of the campers and my fellow counselors with a Yashica twin lens reflex camera on medium format film. Slowly. Lovingly. I scheduled portrait sessions in the early evenings, before dinner, when we had time to hang out and catch up, and when the light was soft and dewy. I photographed Hallie before the dance. Maddie outside the shower house. Molly mending her broken flip-flop. Julia by the smoldering Cabin 5 firepit. Manny lying down in the infirmary.
These portraits capture those brief, intense summers and all of our youthful energy. They convey my deep connection to the place, my love and care for the people I knew back then, our intimate connections. My photos of a group of adolescents two decades ago now also capture the passage of time in a place that remains the same as its inhabitants come and go.
Flash to 2023. I’m a professional photographer and mother of two. Earlier this summer, not quite ready for the full two months that Killooleet requires, but eager to try out camp, my 12-year-old daughter went to a week of sleep-away camp in southern Rhode Island. As soon as I returned from dropping her off, I dutifully signed up for Bunk1, a photo-sharing app that promised “a front-row seat to camp life. Designed for parents and families to be the first to know what’s happening at camp this summer.”
That first night, I eagerly logged in and began scrolling, searching for photos of my daughter. I felt disappointed when I didn’t see her anywhere. On day two, I found her. Or at least the back of her head. I spent the rest of the week obsessively checking Bunk1 for updates. (I am not alone: Some camps are even using facial recognition technology to help parents spot their children.) But the app that ostensibly gave me a “front row seat at camp” left me hungry and unsatiated. I endlessly scrolled and zoomed into low res, pixelated photos that mostly just left me with questions: Is that my child in the background? Does she look happy? Is she OK?
Two decades ago, I was the photographer; now I’m a mom voyeur. Back then, I poured my heart into the composition, trying to capture the perfect moment in the perfect light. I knew that the parents of campers wouldn’t see my photos; the regular updates they got on their children came in the mail in the form of handwritten memos. In the summer of 2002, over the course of the eight weeks at Killooleet, I took around 240 photos with my old film camera. At the time, it felt like a lot. On Bunk1, we easily get 250 photos per day.
Scrolling through the galleries from the comfort of my air-conditioned living room, I’m a distant observer. These photos are so thoroughly not mine. They’re snapshots taken on someone’s iPhone, abundant but unremarkable. I’m painfully aware they were likely taken by someone who doesn’t even know my child’s name.
This is not to criticize my child’s camp, or the counselors who took the photos, or digital photography, or even Bunk1. Just that these photos from Bunk1 leave me with a sense of longing and distance. I feel far from the camp experience of my youth, far from that thrilling burst of newness and possibility, far from the sense of discovery and belonging. I also feel far away from my child.
My camp photographs have always left me with a sense of nostalgia. Even now, after years have passed and I have kids of my own, each summer I feel a sentimental tug to return to Camp Killooleet. At middle age, I still miss summer camp. But this new version of “camp photography” makes me ache in a profound, different way. I feel lucky to have spent formative time in a small valley in central Vermont. At least I have a box of photographs I’ll forever cherish from another era.
Josephine Sittenfeld is a photographer and filmmaker based in Providence, R.I.
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