Fire and ice

Preservation society photos find art through the lens of history

By Eric McHenry

The morning of January 12, 1886, was so cold that when firemen doused a burning building on Boston's Clinton Street, the water immediately froze. It cloaked the roof and walls with thick, translucent sheets, and gave the entire five-story structure a stiff, craggy fringe. So a striking photograph of the scene, entitled "Clinton Street Fire," is actually a photograph of ice.

The image is rife with such ironies. Home to various produce companies, the building still faintly asserts an earlier identity with letters nearly deleted by age and smoke: the T in PAINT has disappeared entirely, leaving only PAIN. The word below it, MANUFACTORY, has faded almost completely from sight, a portent of its eventual fading from common use.

Baldwin Coolidge, "Clinton Street Fire," Boston Mass., January 12, 1886

The most intriguing irony, of course, is that a scene of such terrible destruction has been transformed into something so hauntingly attractive. "The building presented a beautiful appearance last night," one Boston news reporter wrote, "being encased in a sheet of ice which reflected the blaze in many hued tints."

Curators Sara Dassell and Lorna Condon were similarly taken by the image. They enthusiastically chose it for Photography in Human Experience: Photographs from the Collection of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities, an exhibition now entering its final month at the Photographic Resource Center. Like "Clinton Street Fire," the show is a large-scale convergence of the historic and the aesthetic.

Comprising nearly 400,000 negatives and prints, SPNEA's photo archive has long been used by regional preservationists, historians, homeowners, architects, and town planners. Culling it for a gallery exhibition, Condon says, cast a different light on many of the images.

"For a long time we've thought of the collection as principally documentary," says Condon, director of library and archives for SPNEA. "For this show, we began to look at the images from an aesthetic point of view. Some of our photographs have always been identified as beautiful images created by art photographers -- Emma Coleman and Baldwin Coolidge, for example, superb photographers who really crossed the line between providing documentary information and creating art. But for this show, selecting images that we considered beautiful actually became the overarching goal."

She and Dassel, former director of exhibitions for the PRC, picked approximately 80 images for the eight-month show, bearing in mind its four designated themes: family, media, technology, and the intangible. Many are the work of esteemed semiprofessional or professional photographers such as Coolidge, who caught the Clinton Street fire. He served for 30 years as staff photographer for the Museum of Fine Arts. Others appear to be from family albums. But all have a quality -- terror, poignancy, or humor -- that transcends the purely documentary. The "Family" section features a group of late 19th-century Boston living rooms, some decorated for weddings, one prepared for a child's funeral. In the "Technology" section, half a dozen men surround a giant sewer basin on Moon Island in Boston Harbor; all hold handkerchiefs to their faces. Under "Intangible," the streets of a tiny Massachusetts town are empty and quiet -- a quality made eerie by the text of the accompanying didactic: the town now sits at the bottom of the Quabbin Reservoir.

The show's historical focus signals something of a departure for the PRC. According to John Jacob, director of the center, the SPNEA exhibition will be the first of many Photography in Human Experience shows. Next year, for example, will bring an extended collaboration with the Arnold Arboretum, which has "an enormous collection of photographs," Jacob says.

"For the last 20 years we have looked fairly closely at, and allied ourselves with, progressive work in art photography," he says. "But the power of photography today, really, is that it cuts across all that we do. Everybody interacts with photography. So we wanted to come up with a program that would broaden the scope of what we present. We wanted to create a way of seeing how photography has, historically, enabled us to experience the world, and through that to understand the work of contemporary artists who use photography."

Throughout the academic year, the SPNEA show has hung alongside a series of counterpart exhibitions, each devoted to one of the four Photography in Human Experience themes. Worcester artist John O'Reilly, guest curator of Representing the Intangible, the fourth and final installment, selected images spanning the history of photography, from tintypes and daguerreotypes through current prints. Purely by coincidence, he included another picture of the 1886 Clinton Street fire, captured by an unknown photographer.

Photography in Human Experience: Photographs from the Collection of the Society for the Preservation of New England Antiquities and Representing the Intangible can be viewed through April 28 at the Photographic Resource Center, 602 Commonwealth Ave. Hours are Tuesday through Sunday, noon to 5 p.m., and Thursday, noon to 8 p.m. For more information, call 353-0700 or visit www.bu.edu/prc.