The New Arcadians
photographs from scout camp

Snakes, square knots, pocket knives, and poison ivy – An ethnography of Scouts at summer camp and the making of a young naturalist.
Now in its first edition printing, the series is an opportunity to reexamine and revalue the role that camps of all sorts play in society and the importance of institutions that help young people today connect with and maintain life-long ties to nature and wildness. In my own life, the project was an opportunity to explore the roots of my own values as a naturalist.

Book and limited edition prints available in gallery store.

ESSAY: Arcadia, Woodcraft Indians, and the New Nature Movement
The following essay appears as the introduction to The New Arcadians: photographs from Scout Camp.

During his introduction to “Notes on Camp,” an episode of the National Public Radio program This American Life, host Ira Glass states there is a clearly discernible gap between “camp people and non-camp people.” ¹ If this be the case, the photographs in this collection clearly come from someone who identifies with the former. In its uniquely American form, summer camps have proven to be a fertile ground for teen, coming-of-age comedies and horror films. More importantly, summer camps are one of the few remaining places where young people can have intimate and prolonged interactions with wild nature. These experiences are often their first and will continue to influence them for the rest of their lives in profound and subtle ways. Through these photographs, I wish to uphold that for all children, camp should be an indispensable and inalienable right of youth. In my case, those camps were specifically Scout camps, for which this book of photographs is a visual memoir, tribute, and at times critique. In concert, I hope they might form a subjective mash-up of what was, what is, and what still may be — given the ever present need that we all develop a closer relationship and understanding of the natural world in which we always find ourselves. READ MORE