Photographer Barbara Peacock’s Hometown became her muse for a thirty-year project and book. She grew up, lived and raised her family in Westford MA, thirty-five miles northwest of Boston. Perpetually interested in documentary and street photography, she began shooting events and rituals in her hometown in 1982 while attending The School for the Museum of Fine Arts.
What transpired is a soulful journey and personal body of work probing closely with her subjects over three decades. The small town sets the stage as a microcosm of universal concepts that can also be strictly New England. For instance, where else would you see Apple Blossom Queens and Minutemen?
Peacock says of her work, “I believe that choosing a canvas and tools with some limitations and restrictions challenges the artist within. My canvas was my small New England ‘Hometown’ where I lived as a child and adult; my tools were cameras, film and eventually digital capture. Staying put and immersing myself in the same place over a long period of time allowed me to delve deeper into my subject matter and create an intimate thirty-year body of work that is now also book.”
The prints in the show range from a 4×5 view camera, medium format, 35mm film and digital, a mirror less camera and Barb’s iphone. ‘I like to say from 4×5 to an iphone, from film to digital, from public smoking to no one smoking, from people looking at and contemplating the world to people deluged with technology.’
Curated by photographer, educator and former Magnum Photographer Ernesto Bazan. ‘Intimacy is the only word that would do justice to this body of work.