Camp Girls, 1981 and 2006
In 1981 I returned to the summer camp I had attended in the fifties to visit my daughter during her last of seven summers there. Curious to see what the girls were like, I got permission, both from Alison and the camp director, to stay a week to photograph the campers. Who were these girls? What did they talk about? Had it been a mistake to send Alison to a camp of privileged girls? What values had she learned there?
As I looked at the girls through my lens, however, none of these questions entered my mind. Instead, I became fascinated with what they looked like. I loved the innocence and promise in their faces. I saw in them what I imagined as their future selves, the wives and mothers they would become. Or would they?
I had a new set of unspoken questions because my own life had changed so dramatically three years earlier: I had left my marriage and begun my life as a lesbian. As I looked into the girls’ eyes I wondered about their future choices, but I never asked anything.
Twenty-five years later, with Alison’s help in finding 65 campers from the original photographs, I photographed these women again, finally asking the questions from 1981. I asked them to describe their camp experiences and tell me about their lives today. They were generous with their time but it was the hardest photography I’d ever done. These were young women who cared about what they looked like and they wanted their portraits to look good. It wasn’t that I didn’t want them to look good but I wanted to go deeper, to penetrate their facades, to see if there was an inkling of what life might be bringing. But they were young, 33-40, so I made a decision to visit them again in ten years.
When the film premiered at the NY Jewish Film Festival, many of them came to the screening. I felt a great deal of affection for them. Life has already dealt some of them difficult blows: divorce, disappointments and loss.
