• 

  Portland, Connecticut, 1986
  from the series: Summertime
  ©Mark Steinmetz

• 

  Revere, Massachusetts, 1986
  from the series: Summertime
  ©Mark Steinmetz

• 

  Shelton, Connecticut, 1985
  from the series: Summertime
  ©Mark Steinmetz

• 

  Brevard, North Carolina, 1996
  from the series: Summer Camp
  ©Mark Steinmetz

• 

  Cloudland, Georgia, June 1996
  from the series: Summer Camp
  ©Mark Steinmetz

• 

  Hendersonville, North Carolina, July 1995
  from the series: Summer Camp
  ©Mark Steinmetz

• 

  Cloudland, Georgia, July 1996
  from the series: Summer Camp
  ©Mark Steinmetz

• 

  Revere, Massachusetts, 1986
  from the series: The Players
  ©Mark Steinmetz

• 

  Chelsea, Massachusetts, 1986
  from the series: The Players
  ©Mark Steinmetz

I made most of these photographs in the late1980s and early 1990s, when I was in still in my twenties. It seems to me that photographers in their twenties (such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Helen Levitt) have turned to the subject of children because childhood is something they have passed through and that they know well. Children are good subjects to photograph; they are relatively unselfconscious and spontaneous. They don’t have the same developed sense of the past or the future as people who have lived a little longer and so children live more in the present.

As a boy, I played baseball in a league, and I went to a summer camp. Baseball and summer camp were also recurring themes in the popular Peanuts comics of Charles M. Schulz (I was an avid reader of his), and perhaps Schulz’s books had planted in my mind the suggestion that they could be topics for art.

I love the gestures, dramas, and objects found in baseball: the bats, the uniforms, the gloves, the dugouts and fences. Summer camps too have their familiar activities and settings: the cabins, the dining halls, the campfires and swimming lessons. The atmosphere for both camps and baseball games is slow and relaxed. I took these photos before all the digital distractions that kids are exposed to nowadays. Summers unfolded into long expanses then; kids had the feeling of having all the time in the world.

These are my first photographs to be shown in Japan.

Mark Steinmetz

Mark Steinmetz is a photographer based in Athens, Georgia, USA. He received his MFA in Photography from Yale University in 1986. In the early 1980s, he spent a year working with Garry Winogrand in Los Angeles.

His major works include Summer Camp and The Players, in which he captures scenes of everyday life and youth in the American South through quiet, restrained black-and-white photography. Guided by chance encounters, his practice approaches subjects with curiosity and deep respect, presenting images that open onto subtle and multiple interpretations for those who engage with his work.

In 2018, he co-founded The Humid with his wife, photographer Irina Rozovsky. The Humid is a platform centered on photography, functioning as a practical and dialogical space for workshops, lectures, and exchanges among artists.

He has held numerous solo and group exhibitions, and his works are held in numerous collections.