Summer '01

OK, so you all probably know Claudine Doury's amazing Artek series. These photos in fact have no copyright other than school#38 (in Post Soviet schools go by numbers - no names) in Volgodonsk city, and yes I need to google this remote Russian city myself. The photographer of these is probably one of the teachers at the school that turned into a camp. The children depicted are Volgodonsk kids who due to various reasons could not go to a real camp but still wanted to enjoy the summer of 2001. Although it lacks all the aspects of a real camp, it is a camp. The place is so ephemeral, that you are no longer sure if Volgodonsk was a real city and if the children ever grew up. Not being able to trace their lives, I will call those series "Puer aeternus" and have them here for your aknowledgement.


To save you from the trouble of having to look up the term, here is a short wiki defitinition:
Puer aeternus is Latin for eternal boy, used in mythology to designate a child-god who is forever young; psychologically it refers to an older man whose emotional life has remained at an adolescent level. The puer typically leads a provisional life, due to the fear of being caught in a situation from which it might not be possible to escape. He covets independence and freedom, chafes at boundaries and limits, and tends to find any restriction intolerable. When the subject is a female the Latin term is puella aeterna, imaged in mythology as the Kore (Greek for "maiden").