July 3 – September 28, 2025
Reception for the Artist – Friday July 11, 6 to 8pm
As a photographer I have had a lifelong desire to record the daily life around me. This has principally been in Boston and Cambridge. Like the Boston painter Allan Rohan Crite, I have thought of myself as an artist-reporter, motivated to clearly detail what life looked like in this place at this particular time. I have been drawn to the everyday, to ordinary people going about their lives. To me there is wonder in small things .
I’ve often wished that photography had existed in distant times – say, in colonial Boston or medieval Europe or ancient Greece – to have a record of everyday life in those eras. Looking at the archive of Arthur Griffin was a real pleasure because it spoke to this interest of mine in the recorded past – even if only decades before my own life. In fact, what made researching his work particularly interesting to me was that the city he captured was at once both so similar and so different from the city I have photographed. (Almost every photograph I chose from the Griffin archive was made in Boston). I found that we often photographed people doing the same things, such as looking at books for sale on a sidewalk, hovering over a car engine, waiting on benches in a train station. And often our subjects were photographed in the same location – North Station, the L Street Bathhouse, the Bunker Hill Memorial – even, at times, framed from almost the exact same spot, decades apart. This caused me to reflect on the evolution of a city; what continues, carries on over the years, and what changes, what is new. There are physical and social aspects of Boston in Griffin’s pictures that are remarkably the same as in mine. But there are also differences – in what has changed in the built environment, in the mix of people who make up the city, and in the city’s changing culture. To continue observing and to continue challenging yourself to make a well-framed image of an expressive human moment in this evolving world – like Arthur Griffin did so successfully – is forever satisfying.
About Tony Loreti
Tony Loreti is a Boston-based photographer and photography educator. Born in Beverly, MA, he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Filmmaking from Boston University and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Photography from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
Tony recently retired after teaching photography for twenty-five years at the Cambridge School of Weston. His personal photography has been selected for many juried exhibitions and is in both private and public collections. A significant portfolio of his street photography work has been purchased for the collection of the Print Department of the Boston Public Library, and the Cambridge Public Library has also acquired a large number of prints.
Tony continues to work with film and traditional printing in his personal photography. He is deeply committed to the older form of the medium, particularly because of its tangible nature and the look and feel of gelatin silver prints.
