No Typical New Englanders

All you Westerners, Middle Westerners and Southerners who want to meet the Yankee and see New England, can do so by straying no further than the De-Cordova Museum, off Route 2 in Lincoln. In a matter of rooms, you can see the land and seascapes of the Northeast in all their seasonal array as well as the wrinkled and pimpled, more often than not smiling, faces of the people who live there.

As part of its Art Expo '72 program, the DeCordova invited any black and white or color photographer to submit works which they felt best represented the New England experience. Color photographers were urged to explore the terrain while black and white specialists were asked to concentrate on the people. Other than this, there were no stipulations. The results? Varied. The scope? Immense.

The DeCordova has assembled and installed no less than 930 colored slides of the landscape and 236 black and white prints of the indigenous peoples. Not that the museum did not give thought to the shaping of this multitude. Such famed photographers as Paul Petricone and Carl Seimbab selected the prints, Marie Cosindas and John Brook the colored work.

The exhibition's view of New England is not particularly reminiscent of the New England we have come to know through the eyes of such visonaries as Winslow Homer, Andrew Wyeth or John Singer Sargent--nor through the commercial goo oozed out by company calendars or your local chamber of commerce. The DeCordova's view is new and refreshing. You will look in vain for the Vermont covered bridge, the red barns, weathered clabbard and punctuating steeple, the gulls on the wing and boats at dock (probably Rockport). You will even have to search for the Maine lobsterman, the Vermont farmer and Cape Cod fisherman. There is a larger cross-section of class, creed, and color represented here.

A lot of the personalities are friends of the photographers. We come to know them on a first name basis only: Danny, Stefan, Jim & Ron, Jack, Bill, Larry, Tony, Nicko. Photographer Rosalyn Gerstein brings us "Betty on the Beach", rather plump and enjoying the ocean up to her ankles with a few lady friends. Wendy S. MacNeil shows Elizabeth Saltonstall kindly staring at us with her heritage eyes. Lee Post found four young and Lolitaesque Cambridge girls giving different renditions of the sexiest pose. Lawson Corbett's "Guys will be dolls" showed the transvestite in the dressing room--slick, sexy, and confusing. William M. Burke introduces "Clint", a regular-looking youngish man; his mobile home and car sit behind.

A great cross-section of occupations is represented as well; antique dealer, an egg salesman, a grocery store owner, a hermit from the backwoods, a clown, a few auto mechanics, a few hell's angels, ballet dancers, policemen, the works. The photographers have haunted such honky tonk spots as Revere and Nantasket Beach, and Paragon Park. They have sunk into the ghettoes, slunk into back stage dressing rooms, and escaped into meat markets, barber shops, auction barns, trailer parks, fields and kitchens, as well as their friends' homes.

In short, the widely varying streamline of photo personalities can be overwhelming to look at in one turn of the galleries. I suggest you stroll around the castle's grounds and rest your eyes. You can see some three-dimensional sculpture which is also on exhibit, take in the three-dimensional green grass and trees as well as some pinkish bodies with real flesh and bones. You should then return to the equally exciting world of black and white two-dimensional New England personalities. The show runs until September 17.