“I want my photos to be truthful accounts,” Sweet once wrote. “The color is a device to include more reality.”
– Andy Sweet, Summer Camp
In 1977, Andy Sweet was at Camp Mountain Lake, in North Carolina. Based in Miami, Florida, Sweet was well known for his photographs of Jewish retirees and snow birds around Miami Beach. Once again he was on familiar terrain. Many children from his hometown were on summer camp at Camp Mountain Lake, including Sweet who had spent many holidays at the camp, first as a child, then as a counsellor, and finally teaching photography.
The fashion – tube socks and tight jeans, short shorts and T-shirts with slogans like the incongruous “SEXY’ and “I LOVE THE FONZ” – stands out as the teens mark what for many was their first time away from home in a cabin surrounded by a forest by a lake.
Sweet took the pictures maturing teens and those on the brink of adolescence for his MFA thesis at the University of Colorado at Boulder. In it he wrote “photographs are not the reason of their subject matter. The subject matter is the reason… Belonging, knowing and understanding, before picking up the camera, is the most determining factor.”
An article in the Miami Herald, written shortly after Andy’s death in 1982, described how summer camp helped make him a photographer.
The picture-taking began when he was still a little kid, at Camp Mountain Lake in North Carolina. The owners of the camp remember a chubby kid, not very athletic, and the camera was a way of making friends. At first, the letters home were typical, scrawled in slapdash handwriting, more inventive in their grammar than in content: “Dear Mom and Dad. I took horseback riding and art and crafts. In an hour I will go to eathar riding art. I went sming [sic] today. Love Andy.”
Then a suspicious outburst of meticulous spelling and the painstakingly lucid handwriting usually associated with a major request: “My tank spool in my darkroom broke. Go to the photo mart and please get an anscomatic developing tank spool for 35mm or bigger. Not the tank. Just the spool. It should not cost over $3. I am editor of the camp newspaper. Please write. I haven’t gotten a letter in three days.”
Via: Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah: Andy Sweet’s Summer Camp 1977 Book
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