For about 10 years from 1986 Mark Steinmetz photographed children at American summer camps. He taught photography to the kids, but he also captured those moments when children discovered the strangeness and possibility of independence for the first time. Summers in bunk beds and cabins and woods stretched ahead of them, communal and lonely by turns. Part of the photographer’s motivation was to recapture the intensity of the periods he had spent away from his own family as a boy.
