Arthur Pollock, an award winning local news photographer, bursts onto the art book stage with his first book, aptly titled, “Arthur Pollock.” This collection of moments, published by Unpiano Books, takes us from the author’s beginnings in photography as a college student in Wisconsin, through his time with the Lowell Sun and ending with his decades at the Boston Herald. The book’s editor, Jesse Pollock, is the proud son of the author. Jesse says of the initial work going through the countless amounts of photos: ““I went through a thousand photos and 900 made my jaw drop. That’s just the kind of photographer he is.. ..everything is put together for a reason, whether thematically or aesthetically. I tried to go chronologically and snake my way through his career from the ’60s to the ’80s. Within that timeline, I tried to go with other sub-themes like crime or love.
I chose a lot of the photos because they’re continuously relevant. They’re still fresh in a way that doesn’t make them seem like they’re from ’60s. You could run a lot of them with no captions, and people would think they were taken recently based on the way they’re shot. Not all of his work is like that, but I curated it in a certain way and chose photos for that reason.
Photojournalists don’t really like to talk about their work as art because it’s more of a group dynamic; you’re on a team. It’s blue collar, like a firefighter. And you don’t say, ‘I’m the best firefighter.’ It’s hard for him to put his work out there like that. He doesn’t think of it as art. He’ll think of it as a photojournalism exhibition. The nearest art category you could throw it into is street photography, but I don’t think of it like that. It has a hard, journalistic viewpoint at heart.”
The book is available at unpiano.com
Top photos show the author then and now. Other photos show Jesse and Arthur and scenes from Agawam, Mashpee and Boston,MA
