‘The Combat Zone’ was the name given to the roughest area in Boston at the end of the 1960s, full of violence, sexual exploitation and racial war. In 1967, Harvard University commissioned Jerry Berndt to explore this Boston of shadows and vice. Like a war reporter, the […]
Sonny, Washington Street, 1974 (Part I of II) By Roswell Angier, Text excerpt from “‘A Kind of Life’: Conversations in the Combat Zone” (1976) “It seems like what has been done in the way of magazine articles and stuff like that”, one of the strippers at the Two O’Clock Club tells me, “has to do with the really […]
In the 1950s, when Boston was a major Navy port, the area around Washington Street became known as the Combat Zone; the name derived from the Shore Patrolmen, who prowled the rock-and-roll bars, busting the heads of sailors. By the 1970s, when Angier spent two and half years (1973-1975) photographing the area, the sailors […]
By Doug Rickard Stretch marks and desert-devil-dust… Mexican-Men and Tequila-Worm-Lust… Jiggling breasts and White Men roars, sticky palms and sticky floors… Booze-boars and bottle-breath, broken-teeth smiles and flailing-fist-death… Curse and crawl, stumble and fall… warm wind blows through desert-window holes, pitiful views, coming in two’s… alcohol-slaves. Mad howls and nasty scowls, jukebox-caves, flesh-filled waves… […]
Imagine the difficulty of undertaking a portrait project with your own parents as subjects, in which the exercise of critical awareness, and compassion alike, become part of the collaborative enterprise. Excerpt from “Train Your Gaze: A Practical and Theoretical Introduction to Portrait Photography” (2006) By Roswell Angier Imagine the difficulty of undertaking a portrait project […]