Down by the Hudson (2016-19) is an intimate look at my life in Poughkeepsie, a small town in upstate New York. For almost four years I photographed along the city’s Main Street. I walked the same streets hundreds of times, drawn by the street’s character and mystery. With time I branched out and began photographing at an Edenic watering hole on the outskirts of town. Many different types of people congregated in this serene space, all with the common goal of cooling off and calming down. It struck me as a truly democratic, almost utopian space worthy of a photographic embrace. Time after time I returned to these same locations because they capture something about the struggles and beauties of this small town. In this tense political moment, Down by the Hudson reflects my search for an American- ness. With time and through photographing I begin to question whether that ever even existed.
I don’t know what post-industrial decline means. It is a vague notion in my head. Boarded-up homes, the husk of dead factories with broken windows and overgrown grass, businesses went to seed. And the people? The people are missing in this picture of decay in my mind. When I first came to Poughkeepsie fifteen years ago, I was told by an academic that while there were pockets of prosperity in Hudson Valley, this town had suffered from post-industrial decline. I’m not a sociologist and I cannot say with certainty if such a statement is even true. But what draws me to Caleb Stein’s images is that he provides us the people missing from my mental picture. And what’s surprising about these images, no, what’s honest about them is that instead of people, we get faces. Individual lives. Their wealth of stories and secrets are shielded from us— mysteries that we cannot part—but we wonder and ask questions because that is what I think the photographer himself is doing. Hello? How are you? How is your day going? I imagine him asking this over and over again with the same people who then begin to treat him as a neighbour that he undoubtedly is. The photographer as the everyman. On the street, in parks, and at the watering hole where we see that his eye is as clear as the water. Consider the remarkable image of the Prom Boy, a picture taken on the street on which I live. This image does fill me with wonder. Such a fine, even tender, mix of contradictions: the large flower in the buttonhole, the bandage on the nose, the slightly askew bowtie, the bruised eye, the stubbornly dignified gaze… I could go on. I don’t know whether I’m right or wrong in saying any of this about the young man. All I can be certain about is that this is what living is about, this tussle with the real, this strange encounter across divisions of race and class, in a rectangular visual space. This is life.
