As summer camps are canceled, at least unhappy campers can leaf through a new photography book about the beloved, parent-free ritual. Today’s Gen Z campers will get a chuckle at their forebears’ fashion sense in “Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah: Andy Sweet’s Summer Camp 1977,” a follow-up to the late Florida photographer’s “Shtetl in the Sun: Andy Sweet’s South Beach 1977-1980.” Aside from feathered hair and tube socks — the real-life version of the movie “Meatballs,” which was released in 1979 — readers will discover that not much has changed about the sleepaway camp experience since Sweet documented Camp Mountain Lake in Hendersonville, N.C.
“The camp I grew up attending, Timber Lake in the Catskills, was exactly like Andy’s camp,” said Brett Sokol, the book’s editor and cofounder of Letter16 Press, which releases it, with the option to add a custom, retro camp T-shirt, on May 26. “The culture of secular Judaism is the same. He saw a younger version of himself in these middle-class Jewish kids.”
Sweet had a long history with the camp. He went from a camper to a counselor to the photography teacher during the summer of 1977, while he captured camp life for his MFA thesis. Since all
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