In 2017, I first wrote about Caleb Stein‘s project, Down By the Hudson on Lenscratch:

“When I look at the photographs taken by Caleb Stein it’s hard to wrap my mind around the idea that he is just at the beginning of his photography career. And if I can predict correctly, it’s a career that will undoubtedly lead to a level of mastery that will equal the greats. His work is so well seen, with such clear, unflinching vision, that his storytelling is profound and singular. Born in London, now living in New York state, he has an outsider’s ability to strip away artifice and reveal small truths about America and small town life. His ongoing series, Down By The Hudson, is timeless and beautiful in its revelations of others.”

Needless to say, that prediction proved to be correct. Over the past decade, Stein has continued to deepen and expand his vision, creating a body of work that is at once intimate and observant. What struck me about his photographs in 2017z; their honesty, empathy, and ability to find poetry in the everyday, remains at the heart of the work today.

On September 10, 2026, Caleb Stein opens Down By The Hudson at Palo Gallery in New York. The exhibition closes October 3, 2026, and will be accompanied by a book of the same name, published by Palo Gallery Press and designed by Lamotte Studios.

Meticulously conceived and beautifully produced, the book brings together the full canon of Down By The Hudson, spanning 2013–2025. It includes contributions by Matt Carey-Williams, Anita N. Bateman, and Amitava Kumar, as well as a conversation with Daniel Wolff. Together, the exhibition and book offer an opportunity to consider the evolution of a project that has become an important and enduring portrait of place, community, and American life.

The book can be purchased here.

The Palo Gallery shares:

This show will mark Stein’s solo debut at the gallery, following the presentation of his duo work with Andrea Orejarena, American Glitch. The exhibition of fifteen photographs represents Stein’s thirteen year long project inspired by the community around one particular watering hole near Poughkeepsie, where Stein continues to spend many of his summer days. Stein found himself repeatedly returning to the swimming hole, and photographing its community and story. This recursive and cumulative project may have had its roots in a form of reportage but quickly morphed into a whispered epic on community, Americana, humanity, ritual, masculinity and freedom. 

Stein’s exhibition engages with the historic practice of bathing and the culture we build around it. The German Badekultur of its alpine lakes, the Shinto Misogi purification in natural cold water, the Indian Snanam morning cleansing ritual in moving water, and the ancient baths of Rome are all examples of a deeply human experience we keep returning to. This almost ritualistic gathering appears again in Stein’s watering hole. Stripped of clothes, context, political alignment, or status, Stein’s subjects meet through the vulnerable and equal nature of the swimming hole. The stories that unfold in this natural crucible are his key subject.

This focus on community quietly complicates the great art historical reference of the Hudson Valley. The Hudson Valley School of Cole, Bierstadt, and Church made that rolling and romantic slice of America the school’s artistic symbol for the 19th century. The awe and grandeur of nature was to be a bedrock for a growing nation to expand into, yet these paintings lacked  human stories. As those painters showed the expanse, Stein zooms into one pocket and highlights humanity in the wet undergrowth, exploring the true meaning of what it means to be an American. 

The America that Stein finds is full of grace, care and, crucially, play! Boys wrestle, currents are fought, and people float away from society in these dreamlike photographs. Friendship, camaraderie and laughter are all present yet the crux of the place Stein explores is in its divisions and polarities. Trump supporters, young men from the city, locals, and everyone in-between who may be antagonistic to one another in other contexts are not met with conflict, rather they co-exist in a place used for gathering of millennia.

In particular what Stein probes in Down by the Hudson is the concept of identity, specifically around masculinity. In many of Stein’s male subjects, we see strength, violence, and fragility. The polarity of these images and subjects that Stein captures creates an idea of manhood that flows with complexity. In Bode & Owen Wrestling their strong bodies stand in vivid contrast to the playful vulnerability of Nick, With Flower and Smoke, and yet both represent the same identity. Introspection stands in tension with projection, while the adversarial contrasts with the playful. The ability to capture such a nuanced representation of masculinity and show its vulnerability in the context of our current climate is exceptionally rare. 

It is thanks to this studied microcosm that Stein is able to dissect the beautiful intricacy of a community that becomes an allegory for so much more. The curiosity for each subject and the world they have built through the ritual of bathing is done with attention and empathy. It is through this relationship and care that Stein can discover so much and in incredible beauty. Stein’s Edenic work is one of those rarified projects that one can return to over and over and continue to find fresh discoveries, allegories, and connections.

Down by the Hudson

Down by the Hudson is my personal ode to a creek in Poughkeepsie, NY, a small town in New York State where I lived, on and off, between 2013 – 2025. The work is the product of collaborative relationships with the people I photograph. With each of the photographs I want to convey a lyrical, loving expression of the playful exchanges between me, the photographer, and the people I’m photographing.

This work cannot exist apart from its political context. In 2016, the presidential and local elections were almost neck-and-neck between political parties in Poughkeepsie, to the point where you could have fit the difference into a bar on a Saturday night. The day after the election, the sense of tension and conflict became palpable as I walked down Poughkeepsie’s Main Street. I learned that in the 1990s, IBM’s local headquarters downsized and left thousands unemployed. In many ways, Poughkeepsie is like countless other small American towns grappling with the effects of post-industrialization. This heated political moment marked a turning point for this project. It wasn’t only about understanding an often mythologized conception of America, but a way of grappling with this conflict through photography, with its extraordinary capacity to bridge specific moments and details with broader notions of the universal and the collective.

It was during this time that I started going to a local watering hole, a modern-day Eden tucked away behind a drive-in movie theater on the outskirts of town. The watering hole became a central component of my work because it represented an idyllic space where people from all walks of life came together and let their guard down. The more time I spent at the watering hole, the more I wanted to convey the struggles and beauties of this town with care. For several years I have continued to photograph at this watering hole, developing close relationships with many of the people I collaborate with and sharing the work with them as it develops. I am fascinated by how people carry themselves in this space, how the natural environment brings people together; in fact, county regulations forbid people from gathering in this space, and so the whole experience of simply being at this watering hole is informed by this sense of joyfully illicit activity.

I am particularly interested in the effect this space has on men – the way it softens them. There’s something about this creek and its softly flowing waters that makes men gentler, more open to a radical vulnerability and tenderness.  I’m interested in how my photographs can offer a more complicated view of masculinity, and the effect this space seems to have on the men I meet. I started photographing at this watering hole when I was a student in university, and now, over a decade later, the work has also become a way to reflect on my own life and my relationship to photography. This is the town where I met my partner and fell in love – in fact, Andrea Orejarena introduced me to this watering hole when we were still in university. I wonder how many people have fallen in love at this creek over the millennia.

 

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Caleb Stein (b. 1994, UK) is a multimedia artist currently based in the U.S. His conceptual, documentary work often takes the form of photographic installations, multi-channel video works, and artist books that engage with questions around the collective, community, and the relationship between photography, perception, and memory.

Stein’s work has been exhibited internationally, often as an artist duo with Andrea Orejarena (b. 1994, Colombia). Stein’s work can be found in a number of public & private collections, including The J. Paul Getty Museum, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Nguyen Art Foundation, Sixteen World Collection, The New York State Museum, and the Ann Tenenbaum & Thomas H. Lee Family Collection.

His work has been exhibited at The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, FOAM, Deichtorhallen, Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation, Photoforum Pasquart, The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Webber Gallery, Red Hook Labs, The Curator’s Room, PHMuseum, Belfast Photo Festival, Photo Vogue Festival, Vincom Center for Contemporary Art, ROSEGALLERY, Palo Gallery, and Vin Gallery.

Stein’s work has been published in The New York Times, Kunstforum International, LA Review of Books, The Guardian, Hyperallergic, The British Journal of Photography, i-D Vice, Vogue Italia, Vanity Fair, and FOAM, among many other places. Books include ‘Long Time No See’ (made as an artist duo with Andrea Orejarena), published by Jiazazhi Press in 2022 with texts by Do Tuong Linh and Forensic Architecture, ‘How to Move a Mountain’, published by Luhz Press in 2024 with an introduction by David Campany, ‘American Glitch’ (made as an artist duo with Andrea Orejarena), published by Gnomic Book in 2024 with an introduction by David Campany and a text booklet with contributions from 35 writers, artists, and curators offering their reflections on contemporary conceptions of glitch, ‘Glitch Typologies’ (Palo Gallery Press, 2025) with a text by Nadine Isabelle Henrich, ‘Down by the Hudson’ (Palo Gallery Press, 2026) with texts by Amitava Kumar, Anita N. Bateman, Matt Carey-Williams, and Daniel Wolff, and ‘Car Wash’ (forthcoming, 2026 with Luhz Press) edited by David Campany. These books are held in the special collections at MoMA, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Yale University, Princeton University, Stanford University, The Rijksmuseum, and The Center for Book Arts, among other places. Stein is also the co-editor of September, a forthcoming annual publication on contemporary art, architecture, and theory, made in collaboration with Andrea Orejarena, Rain Chan, and designed by Brian Paul Lamotte.

Orejarena & Stein’s first solo museum show ‘Viral Hallucinations: Andrea Orejarena & Caleb Stein’s Tactics & Mythologies’ was on view at the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg in the early fall of 2024 until early 2025, curated by Nadine Isabelle Henrich; the exhibition includes new sculptural, installation, and video components. The exhibition travelled to PhotoForum Pasquart in Switzerland for an iteration of the work curated by Amelie Schüle. An iteration of the work will be included in Fotomuseum Winthertur curator Marco de Muutis’s digital sector of Paris Photo at the Grand Palais, with Palo Gallery showing work from the Deichtorhallen/Pasquart travelling museum show.

Stein’s work is represented by PALO Gallery, ROSEGALLERY in LA, and Vin Gallery in HCMC/Shanghai.

Stein has been nominated for a number of awards including a LensCulture nomination by Legacy Russell (Senior Director, The Kitchen) and a nomination for the Anne Wilkes Tucker Young Photographer Award at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. As an artist duo, Orejarena & Stein are the recipients of the 2024 FOAM Talent Award and the 2024 Center for Photographic Art Artist Grant. Orejarena & Stein have also been nominated for a number of awards, including the Hariban/Benrido Award (chosen by Yasufumi Nakamori).

‘Down by the Hudson’, which brings together over a decade of work made at one watering hole in the Hudson Valley, is Stein’s most recent publication and will be accompanied by an international series of solo exhibitions in New York, London, Paris, and San Francisco within the next year.

Instagram: @cjbstein

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Palo Gallery was established in 2018 in New York City by third-generation art collector Paul Henkel with a focus on academic and historically contextualized contemporary art. Scholarship and historical canon are at the forefront in the consideration of each group, solo or duo exhibition. The gallery program’s curatorial focus aims to frame contemporary art within the context of art and social history, and are committed to offering artists unique opportunities to elaborate on these concerns.

Originating as a pop-up, the gallery opened its flagship location, designed by Selldorf Architects, on Bond Street in NoHo in September 2022, offering 3,400 square feet of exhibition space, giving artists the opportunity to work on a large scale. In June 2024, Palo’s second location in New York City opened in the East Village, serving as a more intimate space for emerging artists and experimental exhibitions to have their own spotlight. Today, the gallery continues to showcase thematic presentations, offering artists a unique opportunity to explore pivotal, intersecting cultural and historical topics.

Instagram: @palogallery