Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market

Author's Comments

Quincy Market is a long building and most photographs of it fail because they try to take it in all at once. The granite was meant to be read as a procession, column after column, and the only way to photograph it honestly is to walk its length and pick a section. I like the east end in early morning, when the sun comes off the harbor and rakes across the columns at an angle that brings out the texture of the stone. Faneuil Hall sits at the other end with its cupola and its weathervane, and the relationship between the two buildings is the actual subject - one squat and civic, one long and commercial, both speaking the same language of granite and brick across nearly a century. Come before eight. The market opens later and the cobblestones in between are briefly empty, which almost never happens here. If it has rained overnight, the stones go dark and reflective and the whole scene tightens up considerably. Detail shots reward the early hour too - the iron lamps, the carved lettering above the market entrances, the way the cupola on Faneuil Hall reads against a blue sky or a flat gray one with almost equal interest. This is not a quiet place and it does not pretend to be. By mid-morning the crowds arrive and the architecture becomes background. But for an hour or so, in the right light, it is one of the more coherent pieces of early American civic building you can photograph, and it is worth the early alarm.

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