In this episode, we’re turning the clocks back to 1976, when America and Boston were in the midst of a massive celebration marking the Bicentennial. While other ideas were considered and discarded, Boston would mark the bicentennial with a series of thoughtful events around the city throughout 1976. To highlight the living city, photographer Constantine Manos was charged with a mission “to photograph the people of the city, of all walks of life, for an exhibition and book to commemorate the 1976 bi-centenntial of American independence from England.” The result of his effort was Where’s Boston, described as “a multi‐image, quadraphonic sound show and a graphic display of Boston today.” Over the course of the summer of ’76, tens of thousands of Bostonians and visitors streamed into the exhibit hall at the Prudential Center to see themselves reflected in the photographer’s lens. This summer, the Boston Athenaeum will revisit that optimistic vision of Boston in 1976 with the exhibition Where’s Boston? 50 Years Later. In this episode, curator Lauren Graves chats with Nikki about the project.
Fifty Years Later: Where’s Boston?
- Our header image is “Girls with baby carriages at neighborhood grocery” by Constantine Manos (1974), courtesy of the Boston Athenaeum
-
Background on Manos’ Bostonians 1976 Photographs (by Lauren Graves)
- Revisit Boston’s original plan for a Bicentennial world’s fair in a domed city on made land in episdode 219.
Automatic Shownotes
Chapters
| 0:14 | Bicentennial Boston Reimagined |
| 3:35 | Athenaeum’s New Exhibition |
| 5:12 | Inside the 1976 Pavilion |
| 8:51 | Manos and the Boston Portrait |
| 14:18 | A Living City On Display |
| 19:20 | Photographing Everyday Boston |
| 22:36 | Curating the New Exhibit |
| 24:47 | Reading Boston in the Photos |
| 26:43 | Diversity, Segregation, and Memory |
| 27:53 | The Book and the Show |
| 28:36 | Finding Names and Stories |
| 30:37 | What Changed in Boston |
| 33:11 | A Favorite Image |
| 34:46 | Visit the Athenaeum Exhibit |
Transcript
Jake:
Welcome to Hub History, where we go far beyond the freedom trail to share our favorite stories from the history of Boston, the hub of the universe.
Bicentennial Boston Reimagined
Jake:
This is episode 355. 50 years later, where’s Boston? With Lauren Graves. Hi, I’m Jake. This week, we’re continuing our celebration of the Sester Centennial, or the Semi-Quincentennial, or just America 250. Whatever you want to call our year-long commemoration of the 250th anniversary of American independence on July 4th, 2026. In this episode, we’re turning the clocks back to 1976, when America and Boston were in the midst of a similar celebration of the Bicentennial.
Jake:
Boston started with an audacious and ambitious plan to fill in large sections of Boston Harbor to build a futuristic domed city that’d be connected to the T by self-driving shuttles. But that plan had to be scaled back, and scaled back even further, and then the bulk of the federal Bicentennial funding was shifted to Philadelphia, so our local plans had to change. Instead of a World’s Fair on a man-made island in the harbor, Boston would mark the Bicentennial with a series of smaller events around the city throughout 1976. The New York Times praised it as an example of participatory tourism, saying, Boston has not become, like some American cities, a concrete graveyard in the moonlight, inhabited by the poor, the predatory, and the rats. Boston’s neighborhoods pulse and breathe, some of them as insular as medieval fiefdoms, others open to the ebb and flow of every human tide. The living past and the living city are the twin threads of the city’s bicentennial effort. To highlight this living city, photographer Constantine Manos was charged with a mission, to photograph the people of the city of all walks of life for an exhibition and book to commemorate the 1976 Bicentennial of American Independence from England.
Jake:
The result of this effort was Where’s Boston?, which was described as a multi-image, quadraphonic sound show and a graphic display of Boston today. Over the course of the summer of 76, tens of thousands of Bostonians and visitors streamed into the exhibit hall at the Prudential Center to see themselves reflected in the photographer’s lens.
Jake:
But before we talk about where’s Boston and the Bicentennial, I just want to pause and thank everyone who supports Hub History on Patreon.
Jake:
These are the loyal listeners who commit to giving us $2, $5, or in a few cases, even as much as $20 or $50 every month. Our sponsor’s consistent support means that we have a steady source of funding to be able to purchase access to research databases, pay for audio processing tools to clean up how we and our guests sound, and get access to web hosting and security and podcast media hosting to get our words to your ears. So to everybody who’s already supporting the show, thank you. And if you’re not yet supporting the show and you’d like to start, it’s easy. Just go to patreon.com slash hubhistory or visit hubhistory.com and click on the support us link. And thanks again to all our new and returning sponsors.
Athenaeum’s New Exhibition
Jake:
To learn more about Where’s Boston in the Bicentennial, I’m going to turn this episode over to co-host Emerita Nikki. A little while back, she sat down for an interview with Lauren Graves. Graves is the curator of a new exhibit at the Boston Athenaeum that opens tomorrow, June 15th. It’s called 50 Years Later, Where’s Boston? And it’s intended as a reflection on Constantine Manos’ 1976 Where’s Boston project.
Jake:
The exhibition revisits Manos’ striking documentation of everyday life in Boston, in neighborhoods from Charlestown to Dorchester, while also exploring how photography shapes identity, race, and belonging.
Jake:
In this conversation, Lauren Graves will describe how her team spent months reconnecting with people in Manos’ photos, trying to identify the Bostonians who were captured in public parades or private moments of reflection, and how they ended up recording 17 oral histories that now form a living extension of the collection. All right, without further ado, here’s Nikki’s conversation with Lauren Graves.
Nikki:
Lauren Graves, welcome to Hub History.
Lauren Graves:
Thank you so much. Thank you for having me.
Nikki:
Throughout 2025 and 2026, we’re celebrating the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, culminating in the 250th anniversary of American independence on July 4th this year. However, this summer also marks 50 years since the Bicentennial, which was a historical event that I think deserves its own attention right now.
Inside the 1976 Pavilion
Nikki:
What is the Boston Athenaeum doing to mark the 50th anniversary of the nation’s Bicentennial?
Lauren Graves:
We are opening an exhibition that will open June 15th at the Athenaeum called Where’s Boston 50 Years Later? And it looks back at a large-scale exhibition at a moment in Boston, a pavilion actually that was created to celebrate the Bicentennial, and that was called Where’s Boston? So in honor of the 250th anniversary of American independence, we thought it was a really interesting moment to actually look back at how the country and Boston has been remembered and celebrated in the past. So we’re looking back at this bicentennial moment in 2026. We’re really interested in this 50 years. So we have this idea of 50 years being actually not that long ago. So it’s this kind of recent past where we hope visitors to our exhibition are able to kind of connect and remember these moments in Boston from the 1970s and link this to the present day in the city. And also think about what we want for the future of Boston. What do we want the next 50 years to look like?
Nikki:
Can you describe for our listeners what the experience inside that pavilion was like for visitors in 1976?
Lauren Graves:
So the pavilion actually did open in 1975, curiously, but we’re still going with 50 years. So this pavilion that was designed by Cambridge Seven Architects and Design Firm was meant to be a temporary kind of exhibition. It sat right in front of the Credential Center. The exterior of the pavilion was covered with a sort of two-story frieze, of photographs by Konstantin Manos that were enlarged to be four by six feet and they created this sort of public portrait gallery, so people even before they went into the actual pavilion, experienced kind of Boston of today the pavilion too had these wonderful red white and blue stripes like beautiful 70s architecture and design. And then you would walk into the pavilion and then you experienced an exhibition of Boston artifacts, artifacts that were related to 20th century Boston history. So a spatula from Julia Child, Boston Marathon shoes, things like that. You would also see a word wall that was filled with Boston phrases and words.
Lauren Graves:
And then you went in and experienced the height of technology at the time, this multimedia slideshow. That was this immersive experience that layered together, About 3,000 slides, 100 or so oral histories, and a score on eight different screens projected through 40 projectors. So it was this kind of celebration of Boston of today and this slideshow video, again, height of technology, that shared kind of 20th century kind of history of Boston. I should mention too, while Konstantin Manos made all of the photographs that were on the exterior of the pavilion, the slideshow photographs were created by Manos, Kevin Burke, Lou Jones, as well as about 10 other photographers. So it was this real kind of collaborative group effort to capture Boston today.
Nikki:
Your exhibition at the Boston Athenaeum focuses on the photographs by Konstantin
Manos and the Boston Portrait
Nikki:
Manos that were on the exterior of the pavilion. Who was Konstantin? How did he get tapped to participate in the project? Was he a Boston native? What can you tell us about him?
Lauren Graves:
Kosta, as I’ve started to call him, is a first-generation Greek-American immigrant born in South Carolina. His parents owned a soul food restaurant, so that’s where he worked as a child. And he began photographing in high school as part of his high school camera club and became really interested in the medium. He was a prolific photographer by the time he’s 19. He continues to work on his craft in college. And then he ends up coming up to Boston as a young man in the early 1960s, I believe. And he becomes the official photographer for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. So this is late 50s, early 60s that he’s working on this project. And imagine, you know, he’s quite young and he’s tasked with something very important and large, you know, for the city. These photographs are really, really beautiful, show kind of the emotion and movement of musicians. And his whole life, he really loves music. I think he sees some kind of kinship between photography and music that you see throughout his career.
Lauren Graves:
So he continues to work. He becomes a member of Magnum Photos, which is an organization, a sort of cooperative organization of photographers founded by photographers just after World War II that promote a sort of ethical approach to documentary photography and photojournalism. And this is something you have to become kind of nominated to be a part of. So he early on in his career, becomes a part of Magnum. And that really, I think, directs and influences his decades-long career. He is continuing to work in the early 1970s. By 1974, he works all over the world, but he maintains a residence in Boston, in Boston’s South End, and he really loves Boston. Some of his friends have told me that he loved all of the immigrant communities in Boston. He felt like he really related to that as an immigrant in the United States. He loved the music and, you know, made a conscious effort to stay in Boston, at a time when other photographers are moving to New York. So he was a Boston boy, I think he could say. And he stays here his entire career and ends up retiring to Provincetown.
Lauren Graves:
And then in 1974, 73, he’s approached by Peter Chermayoff from Cambridge 7 to do this project and create this portfolio of Boston. So he is not a Boston native, but he’s a real lover of the city. And I think that connection you can see reflected in his photographs.
Nikki:
It’s interesting to think about making that selection and thinking about what it means to see the city through the eyes of a native Bostonian versus, you know, seeing the city through the eyes of a transplant who is a Boston lover. And those are two very different lenses, but they’re both so important.
Lauren Graves:
I think so. And I think he’s really attracted to a lot of kind of public spaces, shared spaces in the city. And I think places that where he could find connection as well. He photographs a lot in his neighborhood in the South End and really emphasizing this as a place where a lot of different immigrant communities would come together and find community. He photographs a lot of churches and synagogues and other spaces where people look to find connection. And I wonder if that’s something that he was seeking as he was new to Boston. And he has a clear preference as well to Boston Common, a place that he continues to return to throughout all of the seasons as he’s making this portfolio over about nine months.
Nikki:
I’ve had the privilege and the headaches of doing anniversary commemoration planning here at Old North. You know, we had the 250th anniversary of the Lantern Signals last year. I’m enjoying being a participant at other people’s 250th commemorations. But, you know, I’ve thought so much about what commemorations should deliver to the audience. And I think that a good commemoration is educational and entertaining and inspiring, right? It has to be all three of those things. And I saw a mention of the exhibition in the New York Times. I think this was from 1975. And it described a multi-image, quadraphonic sound show and a graphic display of Boston today, a 45-minute presentation screened in a 300-seat theater with eight screens built on one side of the huge Prudential Center complex. I think about how amazing that must have felt to audience members in 1975, right? They don’t have the technology that we have now. I mean, that must have just been such an incredible experience.
Lauren Graves:
Oh, absolutely. It must have been really the height of technology. And I mean, what a brave review from the New York Times. You have to come visit.
A Living City On Display
Lauren Graves:
You know, a big part of this exhibition has been some outreach, community outreach, to talk to people who were in the photographs and also people that just experienced the Where’s Boston kind of phenomenon. People have such a memory of going and seeing the slideshow, bringing friends, bringing family from out of town to see it as that it was a real representation, you know, of the city. And I think there was a real effort too in showing many different kind neighborhoods and environs, interviewing and talking to people like Barney Frank or just kind of the oldest gardener in Benway Gardens. You see these moments of trying to hear from so many people of Boston today or Boston then. The Bicentennial also included these historic 18th and 19th century, explorations of Boston and America, but this was a real celebration of Boston as a living city, Boston as something that’s shaped by the people that actually live here.
Nikki:
The production of that exhibition was clearly a massive effort in terms of financial resources, technology, content creation, you know, through every lens, this is a mega production. And, you know, in some ways it makes sense, even on the surface level, you know, Boston, you know, I think I can say is the birthplace of the American Revolution. And I could back that. I’m a Pennsylvanian, so I think I can say that, especially so. But beyond the obvious, are there other reasons why this type of investment made sense for Boston at that time?
Lauren Graves:
There was a real pride in the city. And I think the city also in the mid-1970s and earlier had been dealing with a lot of negative press about how segregated the city was. The busing crisis really hits its kind of like climax in 1974. So as planning for where’s Boston and Boston 200 is underway. So I think there was a real effort to combat that negative press or those negative feelings that were felt by Bostonians, that this was a moment of celebration and of optimism. And I think the under Mayor White’s administration, that was a real goal to try to bring in tourists and celebrate Boston for what it is. And I wouldn’t say that whereas Boston is only this kind of gloss of like celebration. Yay, Boston’s the best. It’s a real look at the city and a real exploration. And you really see that in Manos’ photographs. You see you see tension. You see questions. You see. You see what life is, which is complicated. That’s why there was this real kind of effort to try to fund this as that it was good press and a good way to bring in tourists and increase revenue in that way. And also a moment where people wanted to celebrate as they could.
Nikki:
I just really appreciate that they put together an exhibition that really did capture the complexity and the beauty and the messiness and all of what Boston was. Because I think today, there’s just this growing emphasis to really sugarcoat history and to present simple, you know, happy narratives. And I love that when they worked to capture that moment in time, that it was, it was realistic. I think that’s really wonderful and a good example for us to think about today.
Lauren Graves:
And realistic, you know, to a point, right? They’re still trying to make some money.
Nikki:
Fair point.
Lauren Graves:
Yeah. I think there was a lot of voices involved. The goal was to include multiple perspectives, and they certainly, I think, achieved that.
Nikki:
In episode 219, we explored Boston’s original plan for a very grand bicentennial World’s Fair in a new city of the future that was going to be built on made land in Boston Harbor, but then the plan was scaled back and Philly got most of the federal funding. Do you think that visitors to Boston and viewers of Where’s Boston in 1975 were aware that they were looking at a plan B? I’m sure it didn’t feel that way, but do you think people knew?
Lauren Graves:
I don’t think people knew. Talking to people that experienced the pavilion in Warris Boston, people that were literally photographed in it, I don’t think that there was this thought that it was this kind of plan B. I think it almost worked better.
Nikki:
Absolutely. I mean, thank goodness they had to move on to plan B. This was a much better, much better outcome.
Lauren Graves:
And I think I just can’t believe that they pulled it off. And it was it was quite a success. And it worked out for the best. Good for Philly for getting that money.
Photographing Everyday Boston
Nikki:
Can you tell our listeners a little bit about how the images of Boston and Bostonians for the exhibit were taken and what that process was like?
Lauren Graves:
Konstantin Manos began this project in March of 1974, and he worked on it for nine months. The first photograph of the series is of an American Indian rally on Boston Common, and the final set of images is the first snow on Boston Common. That happens in December, which is now kind of rare. And Manos spent nine months almost every day with his Leica camera, which is a 35 millimeter camera. It’s a camera that most kind of mimics the human eye and how we see.
Lauren Graves:
And he just spent time traveling throughout Boston, photographing in parks and commons, sidewalks, stoops, and places, again, of community. One of my favorite photos in the series, he photographs a baptism of a family that is happening in South Boston. And he spent the entire day with the family and they remember meeting him, spending time with him, him going to the baptism, coming to the party afterwards. And they said he really liked the spinach pie. He takes about 60 images during the day. The photograph that he decides to include on the exterior of the pavilion and in the accompanying photo book is actually the just preparation, the family on the sidewalk, passing a baby bottle, of a grandmother holding the baby. Just this really kind of casual, ephemeral kind of family moment rather than the actual baptism. So he’s interested in these moments of, again, of like kind of connection and gesture of intimacy, but these moments that we all see every day that we don’t necessarily kind of clock.
Lauren Graves:
As he is creating this, you know, he’s not photographing the survey of important moments, but rather how people are responding to these moments, how people are connecting with each other, how people are engaging in the different spaces of Boston, how the older generations and younger generations come together, how old and new architecture are meeting each other. Just like these everyday moments that show the complexity of life in a city as complex as Boston. But he spent nine months making the photographs in the city archives. He has a list of places that he knew he needed to visit when he’s making this portfolio. And he also has a memo asking other city employees to add to the list of like where else he should be looking to make these photographs. In all, he took over 19,000 photos, which is a lot, and then sort of distilled this down to 154 photographs that were on the exterior of the pavilion. So he did that editing with Peter Chermayoff, who was the producer behind this project, who was a part of Cambridge 7. And I think you really see his photographic vision come to life when you’re looking at these images.
Curating the New Exhibit
Nikki:
So how did your process of curating this exhibit at the Athenaeum compare to the incredible process of curation that you just described? Yeah.
Lauren Graves:
We acquired a subset of the series back in either 2020 or 2021, and I started working here almost at the same time, and I was just obsessed with these photographs. I had not heard of Costa T. Manos, and as a photo historian, you’re always like, hmm, how do I not know who this person is? And then I spent a long time looking at the images. And these are also photographs that Costa printed in his South End darkroom. So they’re gelatin silver prints and the prints themselves are really beautiful. It’s like kind of artwork that makes you want to look again, you know, all of the different tonalities of the print and just he’s a real kind of master of light and shadow. And you really can see that in the images. So just like kind of aesthetically and compositionally they are so kind of inviting, close looking is something that you really need to do to kind of connect with these images so I spend a lot of time just looking, which is the best part of my job is that you do get to we just get to look at some beautiful beautiful objects.
Lauren Graves:
And then I was lucky enough to be able to visit Costa and visit his studio and his husband’s studio Michael out in Provincetown two years ago and got to see other work from the series as well, that began the mad race to try to figure out what to include in this exhibition. And so when curating the exhibition, I wanted to think of themes or ways that people could kind of engage with the work. And then also, we began also this large-scale oral history project where we worked to identify a number of people in the photographs and then record their oral histories. And that ended up really kind of driving in some ways the curation of the exhibition and the stories that we really wanted to emphasize and tell and how we were kind of designing the exhibition.
Reading Boston in the Photos
Nikki:
Can you talk a bit about what a visitor to Where’s Boston in 1976 or a visitor to the Athenaeum this summer will see in these photographs?
Lauren Graves:
Oh, yeah. A visitor in the 1970s coming to see Where’s Boston, I think, would see familiar faces, hopefully. Familiar parts of the city, stores, or familiar Red Sox baseball player, people, events, moments, spaces that would be familiar to a number of people that are visiting the exhibition. And I think when I’m looking at the photographs 50 years later, I feel connected to the people in the images. I can only imagine someone who was there in the 70s would feel that much more kind of connected to this photograph. And so that brings us to today, you know, 50 years later, as we look at these images, my hope is that visitors will feel this kind of connection. We’ll see familiar spaces of Boston and connect their parents’ or grandparents’ stories, potentially, to these objects that were once familiar 50 years ago. I also hope that people will resonate with thinking about what did Boston look like 50 years ago? What has changed for the better? What has changed for the worse? So many of these spaces are lost. When I’m looking at it, it makes me think about how are we finding that community and connection today and what do we want for the future?
Nikki:
That’s a good segue to my next question. even more so than today. Boston in the 70s, especially before the busing crisis, was perceived as a very, Irish, white, homogenous city. And in the limited number of pictures that I’ve looked at, there’s a lot of
Diversity, Segregation, and Memory
Nikki:
diversity and there’s a lot of segregation in the images. Do you know how Bostonians reacted to the depiction of the city and the depiction of their communities.
Lauren Graves:
In talking to people through the Oral History Project, I think there was a great appreciation for the diversity that is shown in the photographs. I think it is an actual representation of what Boston was like in the 70s, a place that was diverse, a place that was extremely segregated, whether that is in schools or even in public spaces or just how people interacted with each other. A lot of discussion, too, in my conversations with people was about just the literal, like, geography of the city and how that also impacted these, the sort of segregation of neighborhoods. Also, a lot of people talk about how their experience was, Boston was not necessarily, this extremely segregated city that they, you know, in the 60s living in South Boston, there was, Black and white families that lived there together. That is something that existed. That’s something that’s not really represented, you know, necessarily in press in the time.
The Book and the Show
Nikki:
I know that the photographs were also developed into a book. What came first? Was it the book or the exhibition?
Lauren Graves:
Right at the same time, actually. The book was printed in 75, I think just after the exhibition opens. And it was sold at the pavilion as a sort of tourist kind of gift. And it was actually printed on Beacon Street right next to the Athenaeum, which is pretty cool. And Costa, as well as Peter Chermayoff, were responsible for sequencing the book. And there are wonderful pairs in the book. You just find this great dynamism as you click each page, as the photographs kind of bounce off each other.
Finding Names and Stories
Nikki:
I’ve seen some news stories and also social media posts from the Athenaeum asking for help in identifying the people. in the photos. Why is it important to learn the identities of the subjects and have you had success with that?
Lauren Graves:
Yeah, so that was inspired by also the original Where’s Boston slideshow that layered photographs with different oral histories and interviews with people, not necessarily matching them up. But I was kind of inspired by this immersive kind of like audio and visual quality of the slideshow.
Lauren Graves:
And then when I was working on the exhibition, I was wondering how we could, recreate that or nod to that in the show. We thought of using social media, using local neighborhood groups, working with the Boston Public Library and the city to try to spread the photographs and see if people recognized anyone. And we actually have had great success. So we’ve identified about 27 people. And beyond just identifying the person, we really wanted to talk to the people that were in the photographs or that maybe aren’t in the actual photograph, but have a great connection to the space that’s represented. So for example, there’s a wonderful photographs from the Elma Lewis School. And we spoke with a former student, teacher, and parent of a student from the Elma Lewis School who could talk about the school and Elma Lewis’s teachings and her philosophy. Photography is a silent medium how can we get these images to speak back to us how can we also bring this portfolio that’s made 50 years ago to today, and one way we thought was to talk to people today and have them kind of reflect back on these images and offer their own kind of perspective to this you know silent medium.
What Changed in Boston
Nikki:
So from these conversations, and even just in looking at the photos and thinking about Boston today, what do you think has changed about Boston and what hasn’t changed?
Lauren Graves:
The makeup of the neighborhoods have changed a lot in really significant ways. If you look back to the South End as shown in this series versus the South End now, or Charlestown versus Charlestown now, you really see like gentrification and redevelopment and how that has really affected neighborhood demographics. I think also just how people were outside a lot more. You know, people experience Boston, it seems like, really differently now. And I think It’s a much more kind of interior space versus these, you know, really vibrant photographs where we see people walking. On Kite Festival in Franklin Park or enjoying a picnic on the Esplanade. Many of the photographs show protests and demonstrations throughout the city, most often in Boston Common or City Hall Plaza. And I think that’s something that has remained, is that these kind of common spaces, shared spaces, are sites where people come together and are able to proclaim their kind of political or social views. So I think that’s something that has kind of remained. And I think that’s something that’s celebrated in the original portfolio. It’s something that we can continue to think about how those moments kind of shape the city today.
Nikki:
I mean, I think even going back to the 17th century, civic engagement is in our blood as Bostonians. Yes. Maybe that’s something that hasn’t changed for a very long time.
Lauren Graves:
And you really see that in the portfolio. And it’s something that Manos returns to throughout is the American flag as a symbol, which is a sort of photographic trope that he’s calling back to sort of his predecessors. But it’s really interesting when you look through the portfolio, and when you visit our exhibition to see how the flag pops up is kind of peppered throughout as this kind of like loaded symbol but something that we can return to also as this a symbol of civic engagement civic demonstration that that’s what that means he started his photo book with a photograph, of the flag and ends the book with another photograph of a flag. And so this is something that he’s really kind of contemplating throughout the series and something that we are trying to emphasize as well in our exhibition.
A Favorite Image
Nikki:
When you look at the photos that are going to be on display at the Athenaeum starting on June 15th, do you have a favorite photograph or a favorite theme from the photos?
Lauren Graves:
One of my favorite photos, we start the exhibition with this photograph of three young women outside of a shop in Mattapan on just a sidewalk. They are posed also with baby carriages, which maybe are their younger siblings or something. And it’s just this incredible, beautiful image. It’s perfectly composed. In the center, there’s a dog that’s doing, we don’t know exactly what it’s doing. And then just above the dog, you see Manos reflected in the store window. And that’s actually the only moment I’ve seen in the portfolio where we can see him. But I like to think of this as him kind of marking himself as the observer of Boston. And so we kind of see him interacting in this reflection with the three women, it’s just this kind of beautiful purposeful moment you know he could have not had that happen it also reminds you these are you know young teenagers, people still have the same poses still have the same attitudes you know you can get you can rely on young teens for that certainly so it’s i think this really wonderful image where observer and the observed are meeting each other. And this is a really beautifully composed photograph. You’ve never seen a sort
Visit the Athenaeum Exhibit
Lauren Graves:
of storefront look quite so elegant as you do through Costa’s lens.
Nikki:
Oh, that’s incredible. So when and how can our listeners see the exhibit at the Athenaeum and also find Costa’s photographs?
Lauren Graves:
Yeah, so our exhibition opens June 15th at the Boston Athenaeum, and it is up through December 12th. So we have a nice long runtime. You can visit our website as well to learn about associated programming, which will have a lot of really wonderful programs to go along with the exhibition as well as gallery tours. We also published a catalog to go along with the exhibition which is another way for visitors to engage with these photographs which will be available for purchase at the Athenaeum. Also we’re still soliciting identifications and oral history interviews so please go to our website as well includes information for how to get in touch if you have a memory or a story you’d like to share or a connection to these photographs which are all digitized on our website.
Nikki:
And what is your website?
Lauren Graves:
Oh, bostonathenam.org.
Nikki:
Great. And we’ll link to it in the show notes as well. Lauren, thank you so much for joining us today. It was a pleasure to talk about the 1975 exhibition, the exhibit that’s coming up this summer, and I hope many of our listeners will go see it.
Lauren Graves:
Thank you so much.
Jake:
To learn more about Where’s Boston and the photographs by Konstantin Manos, check out this week’s show notes at hubhistory.com slash 355. We’ll link to the Boston Athenaeum’s website, where you can make plans to visit this new exhibition when it opens this week. I’ll also have links to a few of the featured photos in the Athenaeum’s online collection. If you’d like to get in touch with us, you can email podcast at hubhistory.com. I still have profiles for Hub History on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and over on Mastodon, where you can find me as at hubhistory at better.boston. These days, the only social media site where I’m actively posting and interacting with people is Blue Sky. And if you want to find me on Blue Sky, just search for hubhistory.com. If you’ve unhooked yourself from the social media firehose, just go to hubhistory.com and click on the contact us link. While you’re on the site, hit the subscribe link and be sure that you never miss an episode. If you subscribe on Apple Podcasts, please consider writing us a brief review. If you do, drop me a line. I’ll send you a Hub History sticker as a token of appreciation. That’s all for now. Stay safe out there, listeners.