The Psalmist

Photobook project narrative 

When I was 19 I worked at a summer camp for boys. I had gone to this same camp as a child and thought it my duty to return. During training, a camp administrator told 130 college boys that these kids are just tiny humans and it’s our job to help them become humans. That it is our job to love them because they are “here on this mountain and have air in their lungs.” Very minimal criteria for being loved. I heard what he said but I didn’t understand what he said until much later in my career of working with kids, babysitting and photographing young people as part of my work as a photojournalist.

I understood his lessons in pieces. The first piece was that love is not a feeling but an action. And it is work. Not the tedious work that capitalism demands of us, but the work like that of an artist. The kind of work that requires our passion and dedication. It is work that is immensely fulfilling to those who do it, and for whom it is done. My work was to be a counselor. My work was to love. This task of childcare and love has always unfairly been gendered as feminine work and therefore unworthy. This perspective on childcare has robbed boys of meaningful relationships, and has robbed men of the deepest fulfillment that comes with practicing real love. A practice rooted in respect, commitment, knowledge, care, trust and responsibility. For these are the pillars of the practice.

The second piece was that we were to love boys. To care for children 24/7 was a foreign concept to most of us unwed, childless college guys. Kentucky writer, bell hooks, instructed us to love maleness and that’s different from praising boys for performing sexist ideas of male identity. What bell hooks and this administrator were telling us is that these kids do not have to prove their masculine character. Through my work as a counselor they will know that by simply being, they are to be loved. We are both freed of societal expectations when the boys are loved by male mentors and I am freed by learning to do the work of love. They are not family members, romantic partners, or our own children. But going back to hooks, “to create loving men, we must love males.” In my job description it says I am to teach mountain biking, but my job’s purpose was to create loving men. In the boys, and within myself. 

I aim to make photographs at Falling Creek Camp that are not toothy smiles of campers. They are photographs of the depth in which young men connect with one another and how men can do the work of love. It is to show how we run recklessly into the thicket to free ourselves. We are freed as much from our deep bellied hollering as we are from our heart’s softest whisper. We are freed from the prison of patriarchy that keeps us inside, and the rest of the world out. 

So it is with this influence that I escape back to Appalachia, not to preach to the boys about how to live, but through community, show them how we get to live. Photographer Robert Adams said to avoid being a prophet if you can. What you really want to be is a psalmist and with that I sing camp’s motto with my boys, “how good and how pleasant it is for brothers to dwell together in unity.” -Psalms 133:1