Church Street Marketplace

Author's Comments

The Unitarian Church anchors the head of the street and gives the whole marketplace its compositional spine. Stand at the south end, low to the brick, and the four blocks read as one long leading line up to the white steeple. That is the photograph everyone tries to make, and it works best in the hour or so after sunrise when the brick is empty and the facades on the east side are catching first light while the west side stays in shadow. The contrast is the picture. By afternoon the street fills, and that is its own kind of photograph. The 19th-century commercial buildings hold up well at eye level - cornices, transoms, the small ornamental details that get added and lost over a century of tenants. I tend to work tighter then, picking off windows and signage and the occasional figure framed in a doorway. A longer lens compresses the street into something denser and more layered than the wide shot suggests. Winter is underrated here. The lights go up in late November, the brick goes dark by four in the afternoon, and the storefronts glow in a way that flattens the whole street into something almost theatrical. Bundle up. Wait for the blue hour. The architecture has not changed in a hundred and fifty years and on the right evening you can almost feel it.

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