The Roots of Refuge, Rage and Revision: Caleb Stein’s The Watering Hole

I: WHERE THE ROOTS SETTLE

This essay begins with a photograph executed by Caleb Stein in 2025 called Boy with roots tattoo, with roots, The Watering Hole. The image is haunting, offering little context and less explanation, slipping between illumination and obfuscation, allowing it to float as a visual proposal that simmers with any number of indexical possibilities. A young man stands or wades in water that rises to his belly button. Light shimmers across the dark pool, tracing brushy striations of his pale, post-adolescent, refracted musculature across the water. In turn, that light throws ghostly, vaporous reflections across the man’s torso, cutting into the shadow that both models and erases physicality with equal articulation and determination. The figure appears to gently push to the upper left, momentarily revealing a large anchor of heavy tree roots that, likewise, seep into the velvety water.

All is soft and sericeous – a moment embalmed by its own delicious silence – but which is then interrupted by a crackle of what looks like lightning flashing across the left side of the figure’s abdomen. Inky, itchy tributaries that make up a dynamic yet curious tattoo which connects the figure to the roots behind it, as well as propelling it forward towards the water that increasingly subsumes it. The tattoo acts as a kind of hieroglyph, teasing the viewer to go down any one of the trickles of thought it delineates. Is it lightning? A river? A synapse? Or are they roots? Is it fixed, fluid, connecting or separating? A flash of myth or a bolt of reality?

From where to when, how to why, we do not know, but the volt of electricity, possibility or discovery it declares sets the stage upon which the drama of Caleb Stein’s body of work, Down by the Hudson, unfolds. A drama that speaks in many tongues, be they social, political, technical and artistic. This seemingly delicate, almost innocuous scene, devoid of the clarity and thus agency of protagonist or environment ordinarily required by an image, sets the tone for Stein’s project. One that draws its viewer in on the pretences of taking an innocent dip into a personal, visual journal but which, over time, crossing time, space and place, ultimately becomes a deeper, conscious dive into a more abstract matrix of contemporary experience that, today, is as fluid as it is fraught. As unsound as it is undone.

Nestled in the Hudson River Valley is the small town of Poughkeepsie. It is surrounded and served by a landscape so beautiful that it inspired an entire school of American painters – the Hudson River School – where celebrated artists such as Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Edwin Church all strove to evince a little of the romance and rebus of the American experience, championing the then modern dynamics of discovery and establishment by articulating the timeless grandeur of Nature and geography. For these Hudson River School artists (all working primarily in the third quarter of the Nineteenth Century) the architecture of contemporary America – its pillars of belief and codes of meaning - was, ironically, voiced by the ancient valley’s rolling hills, lush woodlands and majestic, meandering river. It was there one could truly understand what it meant to exist and, more importantly, to be American. It is at the watering hole of Poughkeepsie, down by the Hudson, where Stein stages his own investigation into modern America – as trope and code; home and frontier; root and route – that sees him follow in the footsteps of Cole and Bierstadt. It is an investigation that has him immerse himself in the waters of that town’s natural pool – representing so many different things to so many different people – and which turns the aura of space into the polemic of place and, finally, the problematic of identity.

Space, and the specific vignettes it proffers which we demarcate and digest as place, has always been employed by artists seeking to unravel the intricacies and delicacies of identity. The politics of where and who being inextricably linked (never more so than in the climate of us and them that rather pollutes much of the Occident these days). Cole and Bierstadt both turned to the generic, elemental vocabulary of the Pastoral – land, water, sky, setting and rising suns and their majesty of light - to enunciate a specific vernacular of Americana. It is worth noting here that such depictions by The Hudson School artists invariably presented the American idyll as an empty space. Only Nature prevailed, with such denial of human presence adding to both the mystery and ironic ethereality of the environment it registered and, importantly, its availability to be conquered. Nearly two centuries later, the British artist, Caleb Stein, is writing similar love letters to this region and, specifically, to the town of Poughkeepsie and its refreshing watering hole to understand the mythos, pathos and bathos of America(na). It is a subject he has explored for over ten years, having sporadically lived in Poughkeepsie for much of that time, and it remains his overarching quest, informing his body of his work, Down by the Hudson. However, where Cole or Bierstadt privileged the silence of their ‘scapes, Stein focuses on the figure in that ‘scape - now seen up close - emphasising human experience, occupation and our lived complexity. A figural determination that doesn’t reject the dynamic of The Hudson School and its take on landscape painting, but certainly offers a quiet, telling complication of it. One presents space as a trophy to be won; the other as the charge that both resists yet confirms its occupation.


II: A DELTA OF SELF AND OTHERS

Whilst this book focuses entirely on images Stein has taken at Poughkeepsie’s watering hole, it is worth noting that he has photographed the town itself for many years, always capturing it in a stark, unforgiving light. A geometry of emptiness pervades those images. His images of the IBM building in Poughkeepsie or the town’s Community Center or Overlook Drive-In act as a bridge between a time past yet still haunting in its presence: one of wealth and industry that has been whittled away over time. These somewhat antiseptic descriptions zoom in on buildings once busy, but now lifeless, with a phenomenological exactitude that amplify the concern for composition over those of composure so that, for Stein, exposure now privileges exposition. This is what happens to the present when it is corroded by the winds of time. Meaning begins to reside in the residue of what once was, much as the beauty and pain of these images lie in their sterilised silence.

Stein brings the same precision and some of the same distance with him to the Watering Hole. A site that under Stein’s direction has already evolved from the elasticity of space into the resolution of place. It is here where we see Stein literally confront the townsfolk, creating forthright images that speak volumes despite the immediacy of their capture, and which can be wildly different in tone and mood. Sanjay & Sherika, The Watering Hole (2020) sees Stein position his two protagonists in the centre of the pictorial space; a gentle cascade of prismatic refraction unfurled before them neatly offering a visual contrapposto to the trees that line the background. The intertwined couple are relatively diminutive yet the intensity of their (albeit relaxed) stare draws the viewer closer to them than their scale would suggest is possible. This is an image that is comfortable and collected yet projects a filmic fervency; both figures clinging to each other in an act both loving but which also feels protective, inviting a response that is both intimate yet carefully guarded. Stein was clearly allowed to go to a certain point of connection here, with the physical boundary, no doubt placed on him by his ‘sitters’, ironically fuelling the complex, nuanced but evident confidence and affinity he can project of and from them in this beautiful, telling image.

Hunter’s Necklace, View II, With the Shadow of an Eye, The Watering Hole (2025) is a less languorous and more direct image, but one whose prosaic articulation cannot help but whisper the poetry and fragility of selfhood. Escaping a veil of shadow, Hunter’s right eye gazes out to the left of Stein’s space, propelling the viewer’s own capture of the image, read from top to bottom and which focuses on the figure’s necklace and the ocular shadow it casts across his chest (in opposition to the figure’s own eye hidden in shadow). The mood is so pensive as to cloak Stein’s image with a certain dubiety. We are never sure how and why the artist was able to be so close to his subject and how that intimacy essentially transforms the image from a simple portrait to a more convoluted and composed Still Life. Here, Stein’s compositional deliberation and deliberateness chimes with the quiet drama of moment and memory he captures. This is a candid photograph that seems to cling on to the notion that the present never really escapes the past. Hunter’s chain acts as an emblem of his own contemporary life - his youth or fashion - but it also connects him to a tapestry of experiences laid out long before him that the watering hole seems to brew. A history so rich and fluid – like the water in which he stands; like the time that shapes the history of that space and place - that it stops you in your tracks, even as we spend most of our time running away from it, intent on a fresh start. Stein seems to capture not just Hunter as self but also the shadows of the otherness (and the perspicacity that comes with such alterity) that shapes him as a protagonist, a subject and an American.


III: THE CURRENCY OF WATER

Poughkeepsie gets its rather unusual name from the Eastern Algonquian-speaking tribe from New York and Connecticut called the Wappinger. It means “The reed-covered lodge by the little-water place.” and refers to a stream or spring that feeds into the Hudson River. Water has fascinated Stein since he was a young, being drawn to its healing properties. It is an ‘environment’ in which humans function differently. Quite literally, we feel less pressure when we’re in water. Less gravity. Less stress. So it is that all the images from this body of work are taken at The Watering Hole: a little oasis on the outskirts of Poughkeepsie with cool, soothing waters that lead down to the Hudson and which have provided sanctuary for numerous Poughkeepsians from hot summers, stressful elections and pandemics.

Stein’s attraction to water, and his desire to capture others’ delight in and for it, is not new. Any number of comparisons can be made, but one would struggle to find a better one than Thomas Eakins’ The Swimming Hole (1884-85, Fort Worth, Amon Carter Museum). Both artists present their respective natural pools as places of escape or refuge. Eakins amplifies and classicizes that perspective by depicting his protagonists naked. Whilst Stein does not capture any skinny dippers, he, like Eakins, does secure a sense that the pool is a somehow sacred space; one that invites togetherness yet allows for otherness. A communal space where everyone is the same yet allowed to be different. An oasis that is gloriously ordinary, offering safe haven from this most extraordinary, challenging world of ours. Stein’s photographs serve to gently push our heads under the water of The Watering Hole, momentarily pausing the endless vicissitudes of life, sharing the calm and quiescence that is etched over the faces of many of those visiting the pool.

Two works speak to the dynamo Stein invests in the currency of water at The Watering Hole. Shamus Embryo Pose, The Watering Hole (2022) has the figure of Shamus scrunched up into a zygotic ball, seemingly attempting to hide into the small weir that cuts a bifurcating diagonal between a passage of calm, reflecting, gently rippling water and the energetic froth that bubbles below it. In many ways this image sums up best the currency of water that Stein invites us to ponder. Water as life-giving, affirming and nurturing but also that which can destroy. Shamus sits in the centre of such transformation – agent and victim; cause and effect – much as we, over time, have become both problem and solution to the political conundrums that have coloured our experience and particularly so in America. Water Mirror, The Watering Hole (2025) transmits some of the same (com)motion but without the turbulence of the former image. Instead, surface – and the aqueous currency it relays – instead becomes an abstraction in and of its volition: a swirling arabesque of light and shade; line and depth that dances across space in exquisite ebullition. With all signs (and signifiers) of the figure now removed, Stein can concentrate the viewer on water not just as emblematic currency but also as aesthetic material. So it is that the language of water is rescued from itself – that is emancipated from its own propensity for danger and destruction – and, instead, elevated back to that soft, supple syrup which anoints its bathers with the light and hope gifted upon immersion in it.


V: A BAPTISMAL ICONOGRAPHY

The Watering Hole thus offers sanctuary and redemption to its bathers in the same way that water, when seen as the currency of the baptism, becomes more than just mere liquid. The swimming hole becoming more than just a place of communal congregation but a place for personal and collective reflection, revelation and, perhaps, even salvation. Stein never makes explicit such connections between The Watering Hole and the baptismal font, yet there are several clues left by him in numerous images. Braily, The Watering Hole (2020) depicts the young man standing in the water, his hands clasped together almost as if in prayer (or at least meditation), with his body soaped up as he undertakes his ablutions. It is a deeply personal, private moment that Stein is allowed to explore and whilst it does not specifically reference the mechanics of the baptismal act, it directly speaks to its notion of cleansing and renewal, emphasised by the sitter’s somewhat stoic, timeless pose.

Images like Man’s Back with Crucifix Necklace in Water, The Watering Hole (2020) and Man Close-Up with Madonna Tattoo, The Watering Hole (2018) introduce specific Judaeo-Christian iconography into The Watering Hole, investing its protagonists with a saintly mien and portraying them as if they were in the actual throes of a baptism, even as both figures remain robustly human, earthly and fleshy. Andrea’s Hand and Light Ray (2023) offers a nod to any number of descriptions of isolated or dislocated arms, flaccid as the act of baptismal transformation or physical deposition renders Christ’s body useless, even as his soul and celestial status are enriched, here indicated perhaps by the scintillation of light that bubbles across the void of water. The pair of images depicting Boy in Black with Roots (versions I and II both executed in 2023) add another aspect to the baptismal iconography that hums across much of the body of this work. The boy clambers out of The Watering Hole fully clothes but his sodden attire has wrinkled to such an extent it takes on the life of another skin – a new body, perhaps – seen in struggle with but eventual victory over the roots and rocks that surround the water. Christ’s carrying of the Cross fills the elements in Nate Balancing a Log, The Watering Hole (2022) whilst, finally, the submersion of Nate, from a position of floating genuflection with just his head above water to the immersed, inchoate spirit he portrays, enlivening his watery field with a nimbus of ripples, also speaks to both the formal figuration of the baptism as well as the act itself.


IV: A MORPHING MASCULINITY

Such close attention paid by Stein to these moments that are coloured – if not clarified – but such iconography speaks to his larger concern for, and exploration of identity. For it is here where The Watering Hole really reveals itself to be both constructive and constrictive, where catharsis can occur but only in the light of the antagonism that fuels it. Such is the case when considering tropes of masculinity in this series. Unlike Eakins, Stein’s contemplation of masculinity is not libidinally or erotically charged. He is interested in capturing moments that problematize the language or codes of masculinity (and, by extension, heterosexuality) and illuminate the innate vulnerability that all men experience. We see it in casual embraces; long gazes into the distance; flowers placed behind boys’ ears; the ‘bucking’ of boys as they wrestle.

Masculinity is seen as a journey from adolescence to adulthood: solitary figures such as Braily and TaeShawn present one kind of visual trope of masculinity, that being a certain confidence or truculence that cannot help but elicit the tremulous vulnerability of these young men. That perfume of flux contrasts with the pairings of Skyler & Malikai (2020) or Fred & His Twin (2020): one confrontational, the other cooperative; one youthful, the other experienced. Boys buck like deer as two muscular brothers help one another look for something lost. In turn, these duets differ from Stein’s depictions of groups of boys or men. Masculinity here feels charged, animated; sometimes frivolous, other times adversarial, streaming in signification as a triangulation of inflection, introspection and projection. In a sense, Stein unpicks at the various coats of masculinity worn by his protagonists, observing the difference between a winsome, unburdened Michael (2020), owning his pictorial space, and the two Trump supporters, Brendan & Sean (from 2020), more guarded and distant, overwhelmed by their environment. The most important point is that, here in The Watering Hole, such differences are openly expressed and embraced; masculinity now as fluid as the waters in which these men and women bathe.


VI: THE ROOTS LEFT BEHIND

In Down by the Hudson, Stein’s images flow as a series of binary antagonisms, like waves bouncing against one another whilst simultaneously issuing their propulsion and trajectory in combat. Paradigms of community confront those of individuality; innocence is set up against experience. Exposure challenges shelter, earth stands against water just as the silence of stasis muffles the buzz of being. Juxtaposing such dissonance is typical of Stein’s photographic practice and conceptual thrust, with each of his images filling a lack generated by the other in contradistinction. This essay is thus a gentle dip into Caleb Stein’s watering hole: a lively, deeply personal jigsaw of a space, place, its inhabitants and the agendas that colour such life which propose, in turn, larger conversations about the turbulence yet pulchritude of contemporary America. An America many believe to be at war with itself right now, yet which remains a land of unique awe and wonder.

Most people in this little oasis live in Poughkeepsie, but they can be found across the annals of myth and time. They are men and women whose stories – Classical and Biblical - are inextricably tied to the jeopardy and justice water provides, colouring several tropes of identity as a result. Sanjay is Narcissus. Kaleb becomes Tantalus. Yulanda’s husband could be Charon; the girl with her chihuahua is now Leander, desperate to save her tiny Hero. These tales of yore provide parables for us all today. Fables of right over wrong; good over bad; life fending off the jaws of death. One cannot help but spy the restoration of Susannah’s virtue in Summer; see the attack on Actaeon by Diana in those young men with their angry huskie. In all these moments Stein keeps his focus very much on the figure in landscape yet - wittingly or unwittingly - that landscape shifts from geology to art to myth and then politics, from geography to identity. From moment to memory. We watch Stein’s figures grow through this kaleidoscopic lens of his; one that deliberately fuses paragons of the past with paradigms of the present and therein lies the timeless beauty, the delectable déjà vu of these images and which speak directly to the tradition and innovation of Stein’s process.

We have all visited The Watering Hole in Poughkeepsie before. Many times, over many visits, crossing many millennia. It’s down by the Hudson, by the Styx, by the Jordan and the Euphrates. Whilst Stein’s images are contemporary portraits of a time, place and people, they are also those little snippets excavated from the ether of time, sharing and communicating the fears and hopes; loves, lives and dreams of time immemorial which live and breathe as the roots underneath the water. Roots left behind by time that offer stability but also the possibility of appropriation. Stein takes us down by the Hudson, at a time when life in America is full of doubt, friction and abandon. It is there when one can take a meaningful dip or – better still – a dip into meaning, finding absolution in solution; hope in history, and the peace and harmony that only The Watering Hole’s water of community and solidarity – a place and space for all - can and must provide.

Matt Carey-Williams
Sandy Lane, Wiltshire
December 2025 – January 2026