“Seeing Across Generations” which runs through Sept. 14 at the Leica Gallery, has only 15 Manos photographs in it (all but two are from “Where’s Boston?”), but they give an exciting sense of how varied and expressive his work was.
The show also gives a sense, however indirectly, of another important aspect of Manos’s career, teaching. There’s also recent work two other photographers in the show: Stella Johnson, who studied with Manos, and Iaritza Menjivar, who studied with Johnson. So the title “Seeing Across Generations” applies not just to the people in the photographs, both then and today, but also to the photographers.
Boston is such a compact city, which makes all the more impressive how many slices and flavors of it come through in Manos’s 15 images. They’re a cross-section doing double duty as celebration and evocation. Manos shows Franklin Park, the Athenaeum, Government Center (a lot of people still called it Scollay Square back then — that’s how long ago this was), the North End, Mattapan, East Boston, South Boston, the South End, the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The two non-“Where’s Boston?” photos are from 1960 and show BSO beat director Charles Munch on the podium.
It’s tempting to view the “Where’s Boston?” images as history or sociology, and seen that way they’re striking. But that slights how artful they can be: the way the curve of heads and balloons in “Waiting for Columbus Day Parade” chime or how the marvelous array of objects in “Librarian at Work” are all placed just so within the frame. A novel could be written about the tableau in “Girls with Baby Carriages at Neighborhood Grocery,” and notice how elegantly Manos situated that dog right in the center.
All the Manos photographs are in black-and-white. He was also a master of color, and at a time when color was still rare in serious photography. Stella Johnson has a half dozen color photographs, of beaches (in Florida, Southern California, and, close to home, Revere); and a half dozen in black-and-white, from Oaxaca, Mexico. The beach images are full of activity, whether courtesy of roller skaters, a smooching couple, or a seagull. The Mexican photographs have a sense of alluring mystery, at once exotic and intimate.
Iaritza Menjivar’s 10 pictures are all in color. They’re from as near as Saugus and Malden and as far as Argentina. For alluring mystery, it’s hard to leading her “Casa de Eva, Necochea, Argentina,” from earlier this year.
The subtitle of “In Between Middle: Where Stories Reside” could be applied to all the photographs in “Seeing Across Generations” — which title, in turn, very much applies to “In Between Middle.” This unusual, and unusually vibrant, exhibition is in the Grossmann Gallery of the University of Massachusetts at Boston’s Healey Library through Dec. 4. What “Where’s Boston?” is to the Leica Gallery show, where Boston is today — a statement, not a question — is to “In Between Middle.”
The exhibition chronicles the final year of Lilla G. Frederick Pilot Middle School, in Grove Hall. The Frederick, which closed in June, was the last middle school in the Boston Public Schools. Happily, it will remain open as an elementary school, still bearing the name of Frederick, a community activist who died in 2005.
Four vitrines display items about the school’s history. There’s a QR code for a student-assembled Frederick Pilot Playlist. Hanging on the walls are student texts and artworks: paintings, sculpture, mixed media, even some fashion, most notably 16 fabric “empowerment capes,” created by multi-media-arts teacher Ivy Davis and her students. Superheroes might wear them.
The heart of the show is more than 50 color photographs by Lisa Kessler. The photographs are unframed, which gives them a casual, inviting look. That’s in keeping with the scenes they show of daily student life. None have captions. It’s a tribute to Kessler’s connection to students and staff that this in no way seems like an omission. Really, the photographs don’t need words. They’re that forthright, lively, immediate. Viewers understand what’s taking place in them without needing to be told any details.
In an email, Kessler wrote that “the most important part of the exhibit for me was when students came and saw the photographs of themselves and their classmates.” Constantine Manos would have appreciated that and, surely, approved.
SEEING ACROSS GENERATIONS
At Leica Gallery, 74 Arlington, through Sept. 14. 857-305-3609, leicacamerausa.com/leica-gallery-boston
IN BETWEEN MIDDLE: Where Stories Reside
At Grossmann Gallery, Healey Library, University of Massachusetts Boston, 100 Morrissey Blvd., through Dec. 4. 617-287-5900, www.inbetween.live
Mark Feeney can be reached at mark.feeney@globe.com.
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