The rhythms of New England through a restless eye
Verner Reed (1923-2006) appears to have been a restless man. Born in Denver, he graduated from Milton Academy and went to Harvard before wartime service in the Army Air Force. He later lived in Vermont, Boston, Vermont again, and a couple of places in Maine. He made furniture, sculpted, ran a restaurant, farmed, and tried his hand at jewelry-making and silversmithing.
He also took photographs. There are some 26,000 prints and negatives in the Verner Reed Archive, now held by Historic New England. Seventy-six of those images make up "A Changing World: New England in the Photographs of Verner Reed, 1950-1972," which is at Suffolk University's Adams Gallery through July 21.
Even with no knowledge of Reed's life, one could likely detect an innate restlessness through these pictures. They take in city and country, the famous and anonymous, formal compositions and human interest, art and journalism. Photography was a means to an end for Reed; it's just that he never quite settled on what that end might be. Self-expression? Documentation? Just making a living? Elements of all three are on display.
Reed worked for Life magazine, freelanced for various other publications, and took pictures for himself. (The portion of "A Changing World" devoted to Reed's consciously artistic efforts is the weakest in the show.) He liked to cite Henri Cartier-Bresson as his foremost influence. "Puddle Jumper," which shows a man striding over an expanse of melted slush, pays overt homage to Cartier-Bresson, the master of the "decisive instant." Even more, though, one can see Walker Evans in Reed's pictures - especially the ones of rural New England. The church in "Waiting" could come straight out of Evans, as could the people in "Northern Vermont Family."
Both men had a similarly austere eye. Reed wasn't above indulging in local color - titles like "Taffy Pull" and "Butternut Fudge" and "Evening Chores" declare as much. For the most part, though, farms and small towns brought out something special in him: a sense of chaste wonder.
His Boston is a collection of small towns: a shabby-genteel Back Bay, a decrepit Charlestown, an Old World North End (with an organ grinder, no less). The pulse and swirl of classic street photography are largely absent - as they should be, since Boston in the '50s and early '60s was neither pulsing nor aswirl.
"Brunswick Hotel" is emblematic. The building awaits the wrecking ball, and a small celebration is being held in the hotel's tea room ("tea room," now there's a city-as-small-town concept). A priest and ladies in flowered hats listen to a clarinetist and bassist play. Paint peels from the walls, and rubble is visible outside a doorless frame.
In "Boston Globe," a man chalks up the day's latest stories on a blackboard outside this newspaper's old location, on Washington Street. The picture could date from decades earlier; the only thing contemporary in it are the up-to-the-minute tailfins of a car in the foreground.
The human equivalent of those tailfins was Massachusetts's then-junior senator. There are portraits of several famous people in the show: Robert Frost, Edmund Muskie, T.S. Eliot, Dwight Eisenhower. The Ike photo shows him playing golf at Newport, in 1958. He looks supremely trim and alert. The bald grandpa with the Howdy Doody smile that most portraits present is nowhere evident. This is a man capable of commanding the greatest invasion in history.
But the star of the portrait parade is John F. Kennedy. We see him in a half-dozen pictures: a formal portrait, riding in a motorcade, flanked by a couple of cops, eyeballing a newstand's wares, with Jackie (he looks even younger than she does), and in a phone booth.
Kennedy's off to the right, as if he's just some guy who happened to be caught in the picture frame. He appears dazed or as if in a daydream. Looking at it, one's startled to realize the absolute rarity of a Kennedy portrait in which the Kennedy portrayed isn't in control. JFK's vulnerability here verges on the unnerving. So much of what made him who he was was his always seeming composed and unflappable. So to see him without any veneer is akin to seeing him naked. Certainly, he looks more exposed than in any Hyannisport picture of him bare-chested in swimming trunks. Norman Mailer wrote a famously overheated essay about JFK called "Superman Comes to the Supermarket." In that phone booth Verner Reed captured the Clark Kent version.
Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.
