Peter Southwick’s photographs captured Boston’s sports activities and information historical past

Back then, although, most publications didn’t record photographers’ names with wire service photographs. Instead, his memorable work often solely carried an AP or Associated Press credit score. “We used to say AP stood for Anonymous Photographer,” he recalled.

Mr. Southwick, who ran the gamut of Boston photography, from his faculty newspaper to the AP, The Boston Globe, and educating at Boston University, died Sept. 15 in Care Dimensions Hospice House in Lincoln, three years after being identified with most cancers. He was 74 and had divided his time between his longtime home in Arlington and Boothbay, Maine.

He started his profession taking pictures photographs for The Crimson, Harvard University’s pupil newspaper, whereas he was an undergraduate.

“The cliché at Harvard was, well, you either go to Harvard or you go to the Harvard Crimson,” he stated within the 2016 interview, performed by Kristyn Ulanday Blackman, who was considered one of his BU college students. “And for the last two years, I went to the Harvard Crimson.”

Mr. Southwick wrote sometimes, too, including a first-person account of photographing a 1973 Boston concert by 1950s revival band Sha Na Na that ended violently when viewers members threw beer cans on the performers. The crowd “was ugly and fearsome,” Mr. Southwick wrote.

After graduating, he freelanced for publications corresponding to Time, Newsweek, and Boston magazines, and was a photographer and photograph editor at The Real Paper, another weekly in Boston.

Mr. Southwick went on to a employees photographer gig on the Boston Herald American earlier than touchdown in 1980 on the Associated Press, the place he needed to up his sport. Editors reminded photographers that if “you miss the picture, the world misses the picture,” he stated within the interview.

“You want some pressure? You have to produce, you have to be better than everybody else — that’s it,” he added. “Our motto was: more, better, faster. Do things as fast as humanly possible — and then do them a little faster than that.”

Along with these calls for was his ambition to shoot memorable photographs. The New York Times printed a picture he captured of Caroline Kennedy outside the church on her wedding day.

He also caught St. Louis Cardinals shortstop Ozzie Smith seemingly floating in midair, the wrong way up in considered one of his well-known backflips.

Mr. Southwick obtained greater than a dozen awards for his images from the Boston and National press photographers’ associations.

“It’s tremendously high pressure, but so much fun and excitement for me, being in the middle of top stories every day,” he stated. “And also the idea of, my pictures are on the front page — not just in this country, but potentially around the world.”

Peter Alfred Southwick was born March 19, 1951, in Washington, D.C.

His father had been a photographer within the Navy and had a darkroom within the basement of the household dwelling. Mr. Southwick was 9 when he began taking photographs and was critical about it by the point he was a youngster.

“It was important to him that what he was doing was going to make a difference,” stated his spouse, Jean Rosenberg, a retired educator. “He needed to tell that story in the image.”

Tom Frail, a longtime buddy and former roommate from the late Seventies who became a newspaper and magazine editor, stated that listening to Mr. Southwick “talk about what he was looking for when he was taking a photograph, and how to get the photograph into print, was a huge education for me. He would always ask, ‘What would a decent person do in this situation?’ ”

Mr. Southwick “was one of those people who had a very strong moral compass that never cracked throughout his life,” stated Ty Cobb, a buddy since Harvard who’s now a outstanding Washington, D.C., legal professional and a former White House particular counsel in the course of the first Trump administration.

For 9 years, starting on the finish of 1990, Mr. Southwick labored on the Globe, first as an image editor, after which as director of images.

He and Rosenberg had married in 1982 and had two youngsters — Natalie, who now lives in Brooklyn, N.Y., and Lindsay of Somerville.

A self-described “unabashed homebody,” Mr. Southwick left the Associated Press, the place taking pictures photographs meant numerous journey, and took a Globe desk job largely to spend extra time along with his youngsters.

“I did not like being away from them at all,” he stated, including that “my family absolutely is the most important thing in the universe to me.”

As a father, “he was interested in what I was doing, he was interested in what I thought about things, he was interested in me as a person,” Natalie stated. “There was never a point in my life where I doubted if my dad loved me.”

In addition to his spouse and two youngsters, Mr. Southwick leaves a brother, Tom of Bordeaux, France, and a sister, Linda Hedio of Danvers.

A memorial service will probably be held at 2 p.m. Oct. 25 in First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church in Arlington.

In 2002, Mr. Southwick started educating at BU, the place he grew to become an affiliate professor and directed the photojournalism program earlier than retiring in 2017.

“His influence is ever present,” stated Ulanday Blackman, his former pupil.

“He had strongly held convictions and believed in the power of storytelling and journalism, and how it could open up other people’s lives,” she stated. “What I took away was the importance of truth and being ethical. That was an invaluable education.”

In Maine, Mr. Southwick became involved with The Opera House at Boothbay Harbor, serving on its board and taking photographs of performers.

Some of his favorite works are on display there in the exhibit “Where I’ve Been, What I’ve Seen.”

Years ago, he also launched the Route 27 South project through which he melded nonetheless photographs with audio recordings of his interviews with almost 20 residents alongside that Maine street, from fishermen and musicians to a girl who cooked college lunches for many years in Southport.

The challenge was proven a couple of days after Mr. Southwick died, stated Cathy Sherrill, government director of the nonprofit Opera House.

“People didn’t know he died. They were coming to see it and pay tribute to him, and it was announced there,” she stated of the total, standing room viewers. “It was an absolute love letter to the community and preserved, for all time, a slice of life.”

Writing in The Crimson years ago, Mr. Southwick had described his photographs as “just images, moments that are frozen to be recalled, to bring back the sensual thrill of the there and then. They are fragments of a timespan to which goodbye is, finally, being said.”

Due to a reporting error, an earlier model of this obituary incorrectly characterised Mr. Southwick’s point out of Sha Na Na’s opening act, Aerosmith.

Bryan Marquard could be reached at [email protected].