Jack Lueders-Booth reflects on capturing the community that lived and worked along the city’s busiest railway route during the 1980s as it was scheduled for demolition.
One day in 1985, Jack Lueders-Booth was walking around southern Boston (as he did often that year), lugging around his giant view camera about the size of his torso. He was looking for someone to photograph, having been commissioned to create a photographic series documenting the community who lived around the lower part of the city’s north-to-south railway transit system – a section due to be demolished in a year’s time.
It was approaching the end of the day, and the shadows tailing from the buildings and the large, rusting overhead railway were growing taller and longer. Feeling tired, he decided that it was probably time to go home, and he started walking. But then, in the opposite direction, a silhouette of a man came into view...
Text by Isaac Muk