Lost Brockton

WHEN GERALD PARKER, who'd left Brockton in the late '60s to study at the Museum of Fine Arts school in Boston, moved back to his parents' home on Walnut Street in 1974, the 25-year-old was shocked by how depressed his hometown-and its inhabitants-had become. ''The center of town and surrounding neighborhoods had lost far more than their former charm; they had sunk into a hopeless abyss," writes Parker in the current issue of The Massachusetts Historical Review, the annual journal of the Massachusetts Historical Society, which features a selection of the more than 1,000 photos Parker shot on the streets of Brockton between 1977 and 1980. ''The people that I found occupying the city's dilapidated streets seemed to me synonymous with their tired and aging city."

But Parker's unflinching portraits-of shuttered businesses, say, or of a hard-drinking ex-prizefighter-aren't put-downs. In a perverse way, they're expressions of the artist's fierce pride in a city once famous as a prosperous center of shoemaking, not to mention as the birthplace of world heavyweight champ Rocky Marciano. ''Through wrenching effort," Parker writes, explaining his documentary project, ''I hoped to make others aware of the need to preserve our cities and neighborhoods-the places that have shaped our lives."

Joshua Glenn is associate editor of Ideas. E-mail jglenn@globe.com.