Lou Jones, Boston’s Bicentennial photographer, appears again

“They paid me a pittance, but it completely changed my career,” stated Jones, who continues to be working on the age of 80. “It was interesting for this little nobody, and I took it to the extreme.”

Instead of merely photographing handshakes and historic websites, Jones journeyed into the neighborhoods, the place he took his cameras to out-of-the-way streets to point out what the Bicentennial meant to unusual and marginalized Bostonians.

As the nation celebrates its 250th anniversary, Jones’s work from a half-century in the past is receiving renewed consideration.

A local of Washington, D.C., who moved to the South End within the late Nineteen Sixties, Jones discovered his technique to the Bicentennial celebration as a fledgling photographer with Boston 200, which managed the town’s commemoration of that anniversary.

“I’m an outsider, remember, and I’m just learning my craft,” Jones recalled.

The significance of the Bicentennial initially didn’t carry a lot which means for him, Jones stated. And in a metropolis painfully divided by court-ordered busing to desegregate its colleges, the promise of the Declaration of Independence may immediate celebration or cynicism relying on one’s deal with.

“I learned that the difference between the haves and the have-nots was far bigger than I had ever encountered,” Jones stated. “I learned that Boston would be a complicated relationship for me going forward.”

That relationship grew to become a detailed one along with his adopted dwelling, regardless of what Jones sees as a still-evolving dialog about race.

“I think a lot of the same problems exist. Some people are very resistant to Black people moving in,” Jones stated. “But Boston has tried very hard. I find Boston to be a lot more capable of dealing with diversity.”

Fifty years in the past, Jones recalled, “I couldn’t get hired for anything as a Black man, not even as an assistant. But think about it. I’ve now been in this business for 50 years as a photographer.

“Back then, I would not have believed it.”

Along the best way, Jones’s self-taught images has turn out to be a part of the everlasting collections of prestigious establishments corresponding to Harvard University, the Boston Athenaeum, and the Boston Public Library, which holds greater than 250 items of Jones’s work.

“The quality of Lou’s work over decades as a commercial, editorial, and fine-arts photographer is unmatched,” stated Aaron Schmidt, the library’s curator of images.

Through his lenses, Jones stated, “I look at everything.”

That wasn’t all the time the case. Jones graduated with a physics diploma from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute after which labored briefly for NASA. Eventually, and ever since, he grew to become captivated by the artwork and creativity of images.

“I never thought for a minute I would be taking pictures,” Jones stated. “I had no education in photography.”

The Bicentennial supplied a springboard for his creating ardour, even when Jones first regarded the work as solely a brief diversion.

“In the beginning, nobody knew what the Bicentennial was, but it got bigger and bigger and bigger,” Jones stated.

“People started to get very, very into it. It was very palpable,” he added. “I suddenly realized I had access that I could not get in my normal life, and I thought, ‘I can leverage this.’ ”

Jones took his cameras into Roxbury, the place he photographed road gala’s and summer time showers from open hydrants. And he regarded for footage on the St. Patrick’s Day parade in South Boston amid a combined reception of taunts and curiousity.

“I was learning that Boston had these very segmented, segregated neighborhoods,” Jones stated. “I was promoting the city, and at the same time, some people are saying we’ve been ignored.

“I saw that as my responsibility,” he added. “They needed more representation.”

Revolutionary Spaces, a nonprofit group that stimulates civic dialogue via its administration of the Old State House and Old South Meeting House, honored Jones final yr with its Community Changemaker Award.

“Beyond the headline events and public figures, Lou captured intimate shots of ordinary people in all of Boston’s neighborhoods, documenting in a vivid fashion the complex relationship that Bostonians have with their city’s rich history,” stated Nathaniel Sheidley, president of Revolutionary Spaces.

“His photographs remind us that who is seen, and how, defines how we remember the past, just as our memory of the past tells us who matters, and why. These lessons are more important now than ever.”

For Jones, the journey all the time has been about folks, and it has been seasoned with innumerable, sensible classes about easy methods to make these encounters occur.

To embed himself with one of many worldwide Tall Ships throughout their Bicentennial parade into Boston Harbor, Jones didn’t look ahead to a city-brokered invitation. He wrote to the ship crews himself and located himself atop one of many dizzyingly excessive masts of the Christian Radich, a Norwegian ship, the place he photographed a sailor climbing up the rigging.

Photographers with vertigo needn’t apply.

Jones additionally wouldn’t take no for a solution when Queen Elizabeth II, the primary reigning British monarch to go to the cradle of the Revolution, toured the town with Prince Philip in July 1976.

He talked his well past safety on the doorways to the Old State House, the place the queen addressed a crowd from the identical balcony the place the Declaration of Independence was first learn to Bostonians.

And with out in search of permission, he ducked previous one more stern-faced, safety agent, who had been posted on the upper-floor entrance to the chamber that led to the balcony.

“I heard, ‘Where are you going?’ but just bent down, went under his arm, and never looked back,” Jones stated with fun.

As the queen left the balcony, Jones recalled, he started strolling backward in what he calls “the photographer’s two-step — “two steps, click; two steps, click.”

“All of a sudden, I hear a grumble,” Jones stated. “I had backed Prince Philip into the corner bookcase! I thought I would hear, ‘Off with his head.’ ”

After a half-century, Jones hasn’t put his cameras away. Instead, he’s getting ready for one more prolonged journey for his “panAFRICAproject,” which he describes as “redefining the modern image” of the continent.

It’s a venture that reemphasizes Jones’s career-long curiosity in folks — whether or not on Death Row in Texas or the aspect streets of Roxbury and South Boston — and his dedication to painting them with humanity, dignity, and context.

“I devour photography,” Jones stated, reflecting on an extended profession unexpectedly jump-started by the Bicentennial.

Jones paused and smiled when requested what the nation’s 250th anniversary means to him.

“It means survival,” he stated with a chuckle. “Fifty years is a long time.”

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Brian MacQuarrie may be reached at brian.macquarrie@globe.com.