The Boston Athenaeum Brings Constantine Manos’s Nineteen Seventies Picture Archive Again into Focus

This function initially appeared in Issue 16, printed May 16, 2026. You can learn this piece and extra by buying a replica of or subscription to the journal.

I used to be on my technique to the Boston Athenaeum to see a preview of “Where’s Boston? 50 Years Later” when it occurred to me that I had lived within the metropolis for nearly twenty years, longer than I had lived anyplace else. Now, I hardly ever got down to uncover it the best way I used to after I was a graduate scholar: learning it, you could possibly say, taking lengthy walks, following the Freedom Trail, studying the town’s historical past—its proud Revolutionary War historical past—too simply absorbing it, wanting to make the town my very own. At some level, I don’t know when, Boston become the setting of my on a regular basis; I had change into a Bostonian, I suppose, like one of many folks Constantine Manos included in his 1975 monograph, Bostonians, and this identification, this turning into a part of the panorama by which I lived, had modified my strategy to the town. I moved by it, hardly ever pausing to think about the varied arcs of its historical past. It was as if the exhibition’s title—its query, its marking of time, its connection to Manos’s investigation—had invited this type of reflection.

“Where’s Boston? 50 Years Later” options black-and-white images first taken by Manos in 1974 for the Bicentennial celebrations. Manos—a Magnum photographer who started his profession on the Boston Symphony Orchestra and lived within the South End—used a 35mm Leica, the digital camera of alternative for road photographers on the time, and over 9 months took greater than 19,000 images of the town and its folks. He was principally interested by public areas and scenes: the Common, City Hall Plaza, parades, protests, athletic occasions, eating places, libraries, and colleges. He aimed for a type of completeness, visiting almost each neighborhood in Boston, in addition to Cambridge and Brookline. For the ensuing exhibition titled “Where’s Boston?”—which opened in 1975 and ran by 1978—Manos’s images have been a type of centerpiece: 154 of the photographs have been enlarged and double-stacked across the perimeter of a big crimson, white, and blue-roofed pavilion in entrance of the Prudential Center. Inside, a slideshow of round 3,000 colour photographs taken by fifteen photographers (together with Manos) have been offered on eight screens by forty projectors, overlaid with a rating and over 100 oral histories. The exhibition was so widespread that it was maintained years after the Bicentennial, till the blizzard of ’78 destroyed the pavilion.

The Athenaeum exhibition, curated by Lauren Graves, is a rigorous and considerate follow-up to that patriotic show. Opening June 15, it would function fifty-three of Manos’s images—thirty-six from the Athenaeum’s assortment (acquired from the Robert Klein Gallery in 2020), eleven borrowed from Manos’s property, and 6 new gelatin silver prints constituted of digital scans. At the time of my go to, the exhibition was nonetheless a work-in-progress, however Graves laid out a number of of Manos’s images throughout 4 tables so I may see them for myself. As I stood above them and regarded down, it was as if their very nature had modified. No longer celebratory, documentary photographs, and never but on the partitions as a part of an exhibition, they become artifacts, objects from the archive that could possibly be held, examined.

Manos, Graves stated, was an especially affected person photographer. He spent hours ready, by no means orchestrating a shot. I may hardly consider it. Just a few images particularly—one in every of younger moms with child carriages exterior of a grocery retailer in Mattapan, a canine squatting at their knees; one other of a lunchtime scene at Durgin-Park Restaurant; a 3rd of a dancer working the tape off his heels whereas a toddler appears on—have been so completely composed I felt sure they have been staged.

About midway by Manos’s nine-month mission, the court-ordered desegregation of Boston colleges started, and the following anti-busing protests put Boston within the nationwide highlight. Manos captured scenes from this time—white protestors, mid-yell, waving American flags—however in any other case, that context isn’t instantly obvious. They’re principally serene, suave photographs.

To establish the folks within the images, Graves spent over a yr looking. She shared Manos’s photographs on the Athenaeum’s web site and thru its social media channels. She labored with the City of Boston’s Age Strong Commission in addition to the Boston Public Library to arrange in-person occasions at its varied branches and at neighborhood facilities in Dorchester and Charlestown. At these occasions, she laid the photographs out on tables, inviting passersby to cease in, have a look, inform her what they could know. At the tabling occasions, particularly, Graves seen how a lot folks needed to attach with the pictures. I’ve walked by there, somebody would say, or I used to be as soon as there, or I went to highschool not removed from there, or Maybe that particular person is linked to so and so. She felt that these face-to-face interactions have been an necessary step to serving to the general public see the Athenaeum as a community-centered establishment.

Graves managed to establish twenty-seven individuals who had both been photographed by Manos or have been straight linked to the folks and locations that he had photographed. For the subsequent part of the mission, Graves solicited the assistance of oral historian Lilly Havstad. Together they performed and recorded fourteen interviews, which guests to the exhibit will be capable of entry by way of contact display or an app. This is a means, Graves stated, for the pictures to talk again, to layer in new views.

I spoke with Havstad over the telephone on a weekday afternoon, and she or he shared some highlights from the featured conversations. She informed me how after they requested Clara Wainwright, who began the Kite & Bike Festival in 1969, concerning the challenges of being a feminine artist within the ’70s, she replied, “I chase the light, and if I can’t find it, I create it.” Pedro Santiago, who now runs the annual Puerto Rican Festival (began in 1967 by Jorge “Chico” Muñoz) believes that by creating a way of belonging, a way of civic responsibility and engagement follows. Rosanne Solomon talked about her church’s migration from the South End to Roslindale and insisted on being known as “American Lebanese,” not “Lebanese American.”

Havstad recalled, intimately, three conversations round busing. The first was with a pair, George and Carolyn Moran, lecturers who lived in South Boston; Manos had photographed their third daughter’s christening. The different two have been with males who performed for the English High soccer group; Manos had photographed them on the sidelines, in entrance of empty bleachers. Jim Stewart, who’s white, spoke of the camaraderie on the soccer group. Havstad discovered it exhausting to reconcile his testimony along with her understanding of the social upheaval on the time. But when she spoke to Cedric Turner, who’s Black, he strengthened what Stewart stated. The younger males on the group did help each other. Turner was extra express concerning the bodily violence the group endured—rocks being thrown at them from the stands—but additionally felt they have been pawns in a recreation the adults have been enjoying. She realized then how a lot widespread historical past had flattened this time in Boston’s historical past. Manos’s images performed a necessary function in troubling this narrative. She informed me: “When you have a core theme tying together the conversation and you’re able to get at it from multiple perspectives, such an incredible and complex story emerges.”

At one level in our dialog, Havstad gently corrected me. I had been utilizing the phrases interviewer and interviewee. She stated the popular phrases are researcher and narrator, which equalize the connection and emphasize the co-creation of an oral historical past. As a author and editor, I particularly beloved listening to her use the phrase narrator—an individual who tells a narrative that can solely ever be their model of the reality. Was Constantine Manos, over these 9 months and throughout these 19,000 images, in a means, narrating a narrative of Boston? Was he now, posthumously, the third co-creator of those oral histories? How are we, as viewers, taking part on this strategy of co-creation?

I had the possibility to fulfill George and Carolyn Moran in particular person. They’re my neighbors in Roslindale, and after I requested them if I would communicate to them about Manos, they invited me to their home for a espresso on a Sunday morning. They’re each extraordinary narrators—pure storytellers, exact with particulars, checking each other for accuracy. Their story may have simply been categorized as one in every of white flight. But they didn’t go away due to the Black children being bused into their neighborhood. They left due to the few “rabble-rousers”—inspired by infamously incendiary US Representative Louise Day Hicks—who had upturned the neighborhood. George shared how returning residence in the future he seen vehicles triple parked up and down his road. Around the nook folks have been operating, screaming, and being chased by cops on horses, bearing golf equipment. Shortly after, they left South Boston and moved to Brookline, the place they lived for the subsequent forty years.

They had met Manos after they nonetheless lived in South Boston, by Carolyn’s sister, who labored for the Boston 200 Bicentennial committee. He was on the lookout for an occasion to {photograph}, and he ended up spending the entire day with the Morans for the celebration of their third daughter’s christening (one in every of these images was included on the skin of the exhibition pavilion in 1976 and will probably be a part of the Athenaeum’s exhibition this summer time). George remembered Manos fondly. They spent hours collectively, strolling round South Boston. Manos needed to be taught extra concerning the neighborhood, and George went together with him, carrying his digital camera luggage. “The press was hated,” George informed me. “I was his bodyguard the whole time, because with me he would be safe.” Manos, in fact, wasn’t a part of the press; he was an artist, making an attempt to get underneath the floor story, trying to find a deeper one. I sensed from George’s remarks that they trusted Manos, the care he took in his course of. Manos had earned their belief, however the Morans have been additionally trusting folks. I felt this at their home that Sunday morning, a full unfold specified by entrance of us, the winter Olympics on however muted. That this belief and religion within the good intentions of a stranger meant a fantastic deal then, and possibly much more so now.

Some of the vitality of Manos’s cautious, community-centered course of, his neighborliness, appears to have discovered its means into the creation of “Where’s Boston? 50 Years Later”—Graves and her year-long and ongoing seek for folks in fifty-year-old images; Havstad and Graves co-creating all these oral histories; the Morans, fantastic narrators, opening their residence to a stranger. There’s a mild intimacy inspired by Manos’s images—and the accompanying oral histories remind us that there’s all the time one other and extra difficult story of this metropolis we take into account our residence.