Urbanautica

DOWN BY THE HUDSON. WITH CALEB STEIN

by Steve Bisson

The whole thing feels deeply bucolic. Far from offering an objective description of the place, Stein conveys his own impression of it. A sentimental, graceful vision. There are no discordant notes, nothing that scratches at the surface of the images and pulls the gaze back, out of such a revery.

© Book "Down by the Hudson" by Caleb Stein, Palo Press Publisher 2026

Down by the Hudson by Caleb Stein is about youth and life. There is play, and water, intimacy, skin, and nature as a shelter. And you see kids doing the things kids do. The portraits are candid though, androgynous, conveying delicacy, empathy, tenderness.

Outside of time. It could be today, yesterday, whenever. It doesn't really matter. Even the place itself hardly seems to matter. Families, and people have been coming here forever, and who knows how many before them have sought, on hot summer days, the same shade, the same water, the same relief and fun.

© Book "Down by the Hudson" by Caleb Stein, Palo Press Publisher 2026

Anthony, Adam, and Nick. The Watering Hole. 2022 From the series Down by the Hudson (2013-2025). Courtesy of the artist and Palo Gallery, NY.

The book speaks of the many creeks that exist, and of the importance of places like Poughkeepsie, which offer the soothing illusion of being somewhere else. Above all, the images are saturated with water: the feel of it on bare skin, the freedom of immersing oneself in it, at once playful and purifying. The whole thing feels deeply bucolic. Far from offering an objective description of the place, Stein conveys his own impression of it. A sentimental, graceful vision. There are no discordant notes, nothing that scratches at the surface of the images and pulls the gaze back, out of such a revery.

Shamus in Embryo Pose. The Watering Hole. 2022. From the series Down by the Hudson (2013-2025). Courtesy of the artist and Palo Gallery, NY.

Perhaps there is an echo of the American landscape tradition, and of the Hudson River School in particular: not so much in the grandeur of its vistas, obviously, as in the impulse to turn nature into a space of contemplation, refuge, and suspension. Stein brings that impulse down to a much smaller scale, replacing the sublime with the intimate—the vast landscape with a creek, the wilderness with a patch of woods, the solitary figure with bodies immersed in water. Yet the effect is strangely similar: the landscape becomes less a subject to be described than a world to be inhabited, if only temporarily.

© Book "Down by the Hudson" by Caleb Stein, Palo Press Publisher 2026

The black and white further strips the images of any descriptive intent. What remains are essential forms, bodies, contrasts, and light filtering through the leaves. Once again, what emerges is less a place than a state of mind.

This place appears as an organic limbo, a suspension of judgment. Stein leaves out all those small signs and whatever else might break the spell and return us to civilization and its demands. Who wouldn’t want a place like this nearby, where one could bathe on sweltering days and enjoy, even if only for a moment, the breadth of the woods?

© Book "Down by the Hudson" by Caleb Stein, Palo Press Publisher 2026

It is in this sense that Down by the Hudson feels more like a diary, in which the person observed merges with the observer. Stein is not an outsider passing through. In the interview featured in the book, he mentions coming to this place to spend time, to swim, to feel at ease. The camera becomes almost an excuse to inhabit this microcosm and to try to preserve its impressions, giving them a face.

Rain Storm. The Watering Hole. 2024. From the series Down by the Hudson (2013-2025). Courtesy of the artist and Palo Gallery, NY.

© Book "Down by the Hudson" by Caleb Stein, Palo Press Publisher 2026

The book is an ode to this small world, beautifully printed, capable, for a moment, of confusing our sense of reality and allowing us to be carried by the current, while we set aside the dramas of class, pollution, and race that inevitably exist beyond those boundaries. Yet precisely in this taking of position in the water, within his own creek, Stein also makes a gesture with an ethical implication. What if the world is Poughkeepsie? And perhaps it is precisely when art succeeds in doing so that it becomes politically resonant. Or, to borrow the latest words left to us by Marguerite Yourcenar, that it manages, “within the modest limits of our possibilities,” to change life.

Gio & Junior. The Watering Hole. 2024. From the series Down by the Hudson (2013-2025). Courtesy of the artist and Palo Gallery, NY.

Caleb Stein (website)

Palo Press Publisher (book)

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CALEB STEIN. I CAN CHANGE, THROUGH EXCHANGE