Andy Sweet’s 1977 photographs from Camp Mountain Lake, in North Carolina, beautifully capture the cheerful triumphs and the gutting alienation that one can experience at camp.
This cluster of knotty feelings resurfaced almost immediately when I began looking at Andy Sweet’s photographs from Camp Mountain Lake, in North Carolina. He took the photos in 1977, only five years before his tragic murder, at the age of twenty-eight. (In an essay published in the Oxford American, in 2016, the novelist Lauren Groff discusses the murky circumstances surrounding his death.) Sweet was based in Miami, where he made a gorgeously vibrant series on Jewish retirees, a body of work that has been rediscovered only recently (and was collected in the book “Shtetl in the Sun”). He documented those subjects—mostly Eastern European immigrants who first settled in the Northeast, before making their way south, to Florida—as they lived out their twilight years in Miami Beach. Camp Mountain Lake, too, was predominantly populated by Miami-based Jews—Sweet spent his own summers there, first as a camper, then as a counsellor, and, finally, as a photography instructor. Like his elderly subjects, Sweet’s camp kids were thrown into an unfamiliar environment that they had to puzzle out and master. In both photographic series, the sense of the intense realities of life in an isolated group—its cheerful triumphs, its particular internal politics, and the gutting alienation one can experience within it—are beautifully captured.
