G E R A L D P A R K E R
Documentary Art Photographer
Gerald Parker is a Boston M.F.A. graduate, and a N.E.A. recipient. His work has been seen in one man shows and housed in private collections through out the country.
He has been photographing for twenty five years. Mr. Parker's photography emerges as a unique combination of artistic influences and the basic tenets of documentary and reform photography.
Brockton, Massachusetts was a city on the rebound in the 1950s. A major interstate highway had just been completed, and people were moving to the area in record numbers. A viable, productive shoe industry in the city employed nearly 9,500 workers. Downtown Brockton was a bustling center of retail businesses. The city looked to the future with great expectations, because it had endured rapid contraction of industry following the end of World War II, and had thus far avoided the wholesale flight of industry that plagued other New England industrial centers.
Although Brockton was not the powerhouse of shoe production it once was, the city was able to retain a vital core of the industry that had supported it for so long, unlike textile cities Lowell and Fall River, Massachusetts. In the late 1940s and 1950s, many industries completely abandoned New England, fueled by a wave of mergers and the availability of cheap, non-unionized labor and less expensive plant and facilities in the South and overseas ("off-shore" locations). In most cases, the departure of industry left behind large, idle factories, and depressed cities and towns with soaring unemployment rolls. In the 1950s, it looked as though Brockton had staved off the inevitable; the city's tenure as an industrial center outstripped many of its New England counterparts. Unfortunately, it was only a matter of time before Brockton would join the ranks of dilapidated former industrial cities throughout the Northeast.
The 1950s were a good time to be a child in the city of Brockton. Gerald "Jerry" Parker, whose photographs are the subject of this paper, was born in Brockton in 1949. He spent his childhood and early adult years in the city, attending its schools, playing on any one of its "million playgrounds," roaming its streets, and developing a love for his home. Parker's youthful images were vitally important to him because in the 1970s, when Parker returned home to Brockton, he found the place he knew all but vanished. Gone were the crowded neighborhoods and busy shops; in their stead were badly maintained homes and boarded up storefronts. No longer was the downtown area vibrant and full of life. It was dilapidated. It was depressed.
In the 1970s, Parker was a student at the Museum of Fine arts school in Boston. Here he experimented with many different artistic mediums, among them photography. Parker studied many different photographers and their techniques, which illustrated the capabilities of the camera, suggested many different ideas for photographic subjects, and gave him a variety of ways of looking at Brockton. After coming home in the 1970s he realized he saw the city through different eyes; he suddenly understood that the place he knew as a boy was disappearing. Not long after he returned, he decided to begin a project to document what was left of his childhood home through a series of photographs.
Parker began shooting in 1974 and continued until the early 1980s. There are over a thousand negatives and three hundred prints from the project. The images he captured, though intended for documentary purposes, did what he initially intended them to do - catalogue an inventory of the architecture of downtown Brockton. What also emerges in these "documentary" photographs is a narrative of reminiscence. Parker photographed scenes that affected him. He was moved by a sense that the Brockton he knew was in danger of disappearing, and his photographs expressed his emotional responses to his memories and sense of loss - joy and despair, compassion and callousness, lucidity and madness, pride and shame. All of these responses shine through in Parker's Brockton photographs. The narrative created by Parker's photographs effectively captured the physical decay of the city, displayed the social, economic, and human costs of deindustrialization, and testified as to what he valued in the Brockton he had known.
Parker's intention was to use photographs taken in the 1970s and early 1980s to convey the past. This interest helps to explain the absence of young and middle-aged people in many of the compositions. Another absence is the factory work process itself. Parker never went into the factories, within his family only his deceased grandfather had ever worked there. But the factories were at the heart of Brockton's social and economic fabric. In the 1970s Brockton photographs, Parker conveyed working people alternately through the construction, retail, and food service jobs that employed them in the post-mill period.
These photographs, important for far more than their subject matter, represent Parker's attempt to reconcile the changes in the city, as well as to capture the essence of what remained of the home he once knew. Some images were composed strictly for their documentary qualities, while others were taken of people that the photographer was familiar with or simply found interesting.
Several elements must be understood in order to properly read Parker's Brockton photographs. Artistic influences had a profound effect on Parker, and he appropriated elements from a wide variety sources to create his hybrid style. In the Brockton photographs, Parker utilized a concept he refers to as the "building" of the compositions, as well as techniques normally used in other mediums, such as painting and drawing. The result of Parker's approach is a unique combination of documentary and contemporary reform photography.
This paper demonstrates how a careful reading of Parker's photos from the 1970s and 1980s can help us interpret Brockton's history, the disappearing Brockton of Parker's youth. The photographs from the 1970s, and the subjects, forgotten even as they lived, have only slipped further into obscurity as time has passed. I intend to shed light on the motivation behind the Brockton project, briefly analyze and explore the content of the images, investigate their location in photographic history, and provide the historical and social contexts in which they were taken.
Brocktonians were, and are, proud of their city. While researching this project I discovered that without exception, residents of the Brockton area either past or present have a passion for their home. What we see in the photographs that follow is one photographer's attempt to define that love and create a narrative revealing the streets of his youth.
E-Mail: Gerald Parker