Playground Once

In 2003, as David Freund was driving to Missouri to see a 102-year-old friend, she died. Reflecting on their meeting when he was a child, he stopped in Illinois to photograph an old playground. Besides swings, teeter-totters and slides, there were cannon, war memorials, a picnic area, a cornfield, and a baseball field; evocative and telling, a site of community and play. The moment launched a two-year odyssey to find and photograph such places. Freund soon realized playgrounds were an endangered species. In cities, because of safety and liability concerns, their apparatus, familiar to many childhoods, had largely been supplanted by bright structures of multicolored plastic and enameled steel. Thus, Freund focused on small towns where tradition, inertia and budget often permitted early playgrounds to survive. These were usually unoccupied, so children rarely appear in Freund's photographs, although alluded to in footprints, worn paint, and ruts under swings. Weather, light and viewpoint contribute to suggested narratives, yet the direct preservation aspect of the project is clear. As with other species that vanish, one day they are everywhere, the next, gone.