Camp Girls_Artist's Interview.mov

Camp Girls by Gay Block

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 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?

Twenty-five years later, in 2006, I visited sixty-five of these to photograph them and to ask the questions I hadnt asked in 1981. In Camp Girls the women speak for themselves about then and now, as the photographs from 1981 provide a picture of life at summer camp.

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