The German photographer Ursula Schulz-Dornburg took this picture at an adventure playground called Jongensland (“Boysland”) 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. A new collection of them, Huts, Temples, Castles, is published this month.
