In 1969, German photographer Ursula Schulz-Dornburg captured a Dutch utopian playground designed for den-building and adventure – and in hope of a better future
he German photographer Ursula Schulz-Dornburg took this picture at an adventure playground called Jongensland in Amsterdam in 1969. The site, which had been created just after the war, could only be reached by crossing a canal on a boat. In it, children – boys and girls, despite the name – were encouraged, or at liberty, to make days of adventure, building campfires and using scrap building materials to knock together dens and sheds.
When she discovered Jongensland, Schulz-Dornburg had lately been working on a project involving young heroin addicts in Düsseldorf, where she lived. She instinctively felt that the children in Amsterdam had the raw materials for a more constructive future. She ended up making many photographs of the structures built at the site.
The photographer reacted to the power of that idea in contrast to her own growing up: “Germany was terrible,” she says in the introduction. “It didn’t change very much, before and after the war. Places built for children were horrible. There was nothing to help you develop your personality. You couldn’t build, you couldn’t work with your hands, you didn’t have the possibility of working with others to discover what you could and couldn’t build. It didn’t exist.
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