Devil's pool

WISSAHICKON PARK sits surrounded by city neighbourhoods, a sprawling public green space home to miles upon miles of trails. It’s one of the few remaining wild areas left in Philadelphia.

Make your way down one of these trails, following a creek that runs through a small valley, and you’ll eventually reach a waterfall. Here you can find Devil’s Pool: a local swimming hole decorated with thick woodland and seemingly ancient rock formations, set beneath a five-storey, high-arched bridge that shoulders an old sewer line.

The spot is said to have been given its name from the Leni Lenape, an Indigenous people of the Northeastern Woodlands who believed Devil’s Pool to be an interface between good and evil. Today, it serves as a place for Philadelphians to come together in the water, despite the fact that both swimming and diving there remain – on paper, at least – illegal.

Photographer Sarah Kaufman grew up in Philly. She remembers hiking through Wissahickon Park and trips to Devil’s Pool, where she’d swim in the summer and slide down frozen waterfalls during wintertime. She would eventually move from her hometown – living in Richmond, VA, for grad school, then later Brooklyn, NYC – before making her way back in 2012.

It was in 2014 that she properly returned to Devil’s Pool, this time with the idea of documenting its singular magic. “I was there through my interest in looking at the body,” she says. “I’d been photographing people naked, stripped down in their own homes, thinking about vulnerability and moments when the body could be fully engaged in its surroundings – when we as people are really embedded in what we’re doing physically and psychologically.”

“I started wandering around Wissahickon Park again when I moved back to Philly. I really gravitated towards Devil’s Pool because it was this place where people were stripping off their clothing and just being. I mean, they were in bathing suits, but they were in their bodies, in this space, really viscerally connected to the la