Photographer gets face to face with Boston
The ideal Boston family album would have hundreds of thousands portraits in it, one for every resident of the metropolitan area.
Until that album is assembled, Bill Brett's ''Boston: All One Family" will suffice. It has only 240 portraits -- but what they lack in quantity they more than make up in quality.
''Bill is the official photographer of the city of Boston, as far as I'm concerned," says Jack Connors, one of Brett's sitters for the book, as well as chairman of the advertising firm Hill Holliday. ''He's been shooting a lot of pictures for a long time, but this was a chance for him to take it to another level."
Brett, 60, spent four decades working as a Boston Globe staff photographer before retiring in 2001. He still shoots for the paper's weekly Party Lines and Seen features.
It was Party Lines that inspired ''Boston: All One Family," Brett says. Taking all those pictures of people working at play gave him the idea for a richer, more lasting record of Bostonians eminent and otherwise.
''I was trying to record history at this particular time," says Brett, ''how Boston is changing. These were people from all walks of life who, I felt, contribute to making Boston the city it is."
There's literary Boston (sitter Robert B. Parker contributes a foreword), business Boston, academic Boston, media Boston, and, of course, political Boston, with two US senators, five US representatives, three governors, and three mayors.
The mayors -- Thomas E. Menino and his two predecessors, Kevin White and Ray Flynn -- pose together, in the Public Garden, bearing bumbershoots. They look like understudies for Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, and Donald O'Connor in ''Singin' in the Rain."
''That's my favorite picture," Brett says with a laugh. ''I wanted a strong image for the cover, and here you have almost 40 years of Boston history. So what happens when I get them all together? It's pouring out, raining like hell. Well, I run into Walgreens to buy umbrellas and, you know, it's the umbrellas that made the picture."
Connors's picture is one of several dual portraits in the book (he appears with his own reflection). Some pairings are expected (Jay Geils and Peter Wolf performing), some not (Steven Tyler and Bobby Orr). Even more memorable are the family groups: five Athanases (of the restaurant Athanases), five Saunderses (of the hotel Saunderses), six Krafts (of the football Krafts), six Rappaports (of the real estate Rappaports), and seven Dropkick Murphys.
All right, the Dropkicks aren't a family, they're a musical group. But there is an actual Murphy family on hand, the Dorchester undertakers. Brett's picture is a casket-eye view. ''I was able to climb into the hearse and climb out," he says. ''Not too many people can say that!"
A Dorchester native, Brett lived there for 30 years; he now lives in Hingham. His first job was developing photographs for the pathology lab at Massachusetts General Hospital. On Sept. 23, a copy of ''Boston: All One Family" will be auctioned at the Storybook Ball at Fenway Park; proceeds go to MassGeneral Hospital for Children.
What makes this copy special is that it's one of three in which Brett has gotten each living sitter to autograph his or her portrait. (Almost every one: Seiji Ozawa is in Vienna for the rest of 2005, but Brett hopes to get him early next year.) The other two copies will go to the Boston Public Library and Brett's four children.
''I've been tied up with this project; it was time consuming," Brett says of ''Boston: All One Family." ''I did it all myself: the scheduling, the shooting. I used just a tripod and a reflector, no studio lights. I tried to do it as naturally as I could. I chose black and white, rather than color, because of its timelessness. This book is my gift to Boston, because Boston's been good to me."
Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.
