A Salute to the Colors

All my years as an art director developing visual material for young children has had a profound impact on how I approach photography. To the five-year-old everything is a discovery. The challenge was to capture the child’s interest and imagination. It could be creative, but it always had a concrete element. Similarly, in my photography, I aim to capture the viewer’s interest and imagination by suggesting a familiar world newly discovered.

I have been photographing the Patriots’ Day parade since I moved to Lexington in 1975. The annual event is a great source of pride in the town where, on April 19, 1775, the American Revolution began. Over the years, I have been drawn to common threads that run throughout the parade like the flags, drums, uniforms, and people of all ages. But for all the common threads, there are many differences in the vast variety of details, patterns, and colors. Recently I have been drawn to the detail of hands. Much of the life of a parade is in the hands. Hands are playing the instruments, holding the flags, or waving to the crowd.

In this series I bring attention to both the details and commonalities that might otherwise be overlooked. To do this I present photographs of the Patriots’ Day parade that capture a single moment and photo-composites I create that combine similar aspects of the parade into a single collage composition.

While, over many years of photographing Lexington’s Patriots’ Day parade, my attention has been drawn to a variety of elements of the parade, my goal throughout is to engage the viewer in the visual richness of this ongoing tradition and honor historic and present-day Lexington for a tradition that brings to mind the birth of our country.