Hometown | Westford, Massachusetts
For years, Barbara Peacock has been photographing life in a small New England town that’s as ordinary as can be. What she captured, though, is anything but.
By Mel Allen|Jun 15 2017|
Coffee By Design | Portland, Maine
Photo Credit : Katherine KeenanAt the age of 3, Barbara Pallian moved with her parents and siblings into a turn-of-the-century fixer-upper on five acres in the center of Westford, Massachusetts. This was the 1960s, when the town about 35 miles northwest of Boston had fewer than 9,000 souls. She grew up in a household that honored reading, the arts, and country life, and fell in love with photography in her early teens—walking everywhere, just looking, snapping images.
She went on to attend art school in Boston, where what would become a decades-long project began with a simple assignment: “Photograph something of importance.” Seeing a group of kids hanging out at a local market in Westford one day, “I took out the school’s 4-by-5 camera and took the shot,” she recalls. “When I showed it to my professor, he said, ‘Well, you see you can travel the world looking for interesting places and people, but in fact you can find them right in your backyard.’”
“One day I saw five kids hanging out on the stoop of a local market…. They seemed bored to death, yet savoring their daily ritual,” photographer Barbara Peacock recalls. “At that moment, I was aware of the impermanence of the present and how this daily ritual would ultimately be replaced by memory, childhood by adulthood, and perhaps even the store may disappear.”
Photo Credit : Barbara Peacock
That image, Parent’s Market, 1982, marked the start of her passion for documentary photography, which she pursued even as she launched a career as a professional wedding and commercial photographer. She got married, becoming Barbara Peacock, and raised a family in Westford, all the while collecting thousands of images of her hometown. She found day-to-day moments that would resonate with people anywhere who felt the power of roots and place. Whether she was using a large-format camera, 35mm color or black-and-white film, a digital camera, a mirrorless camera, or even her iPhone, what made the difference was her eye, and her feeling for her neighbors.
About 20 years ago, “I started realizing this could be a body of work,” Peacock says. She also saw the potential of a book to document her town’s transition from country to more urban: With a major highway cutting nearby, Westford’s population nearly tripled over time, apple orchards became houses, and memories of a quieter time grew even more precious. Yet the resulting compilation of her favorite images from the past 33 years, titled Hometown, focuses less on what has changed and more on deeper truths—the bonds between people, the annual events that have always connected generations.
Last summer, with their three sons having left the nest, Barbara Peacock and her husband, Tom, moved to Portland, Maine, a city they had always loved. Plus, her mother, now in her late nineties, lives in southern Maine, as does a sister. But when Peacock drove away from Westford, a town that had become her extended family through her photographs, she felt not the call of a new place so much as the bittersweet taste of good-bye. “We all had a little cry,” she says.
As a photographer, Peacock would “try very hard to be unseen,” as she puts it. “I would just go to all these town events and just be a fly on the wall.”
Photo Credit : Barbara Peacock
“On a good day, I might shoot 400 images,” says Peacock, who was struck by the postures and outfits of these two local women at a fireman’s muster. “If you ask for permission to take the photo, the moment is gone. I always ask afterward.”
Photo Credit : Barbara Peacock
![Snow cones, 1983 “I love how carefree [these kids] look. Even the boy in the back seems bored but he is still observing. Today those kids would be lost in their cellphones. I always think that people back then did a lot more daydreaming.”](https://newengland.com/wp-content/uploads/Hometown4.jpg)
“I love how carefree [these kids] look. Even the boy in the back seems bored but he is still observing. Today those kids would be lost in their cellphones. I always think that people back then did a lot more daydreaming.”
Photo Credit : Barbara Peacock
When a friend’s daughter was having her First Communion, Peacock was there to capture it. “Time changes physical things,” she says, “but the quintessential us—our community, togetherness, and kinship—remains, especially when we are bound by our hometown.”
Photo Credit : Barbara Peacock
Peacock says this photograph was taken at her son’s class play when he was 6 or 7. Her mentor, the photographer and teacher Ernesto Bazan, says of Hometown, “‘Intimacy’ is the only word that would do justice to this body of work.”
Photo Credit : Barbara Peacock
“I was the wedding photographer this day. I was in art school, and nobody wants to say you are shooting weddings. But when you’re at a wedding you can shoot anything!” The photograph recently won an award in a portraiture show in London.
Photo Credit : Barbara Peacock
For this annual parade, “everyone marches through the center of town, past the common, just filled with people on all sides. My whole life I’ve tried not to shoot the parade, not the ceremonial part, but what’s all around it.”
Photo Credit : Barbara Peacock
Peacock says of her relationship to Westford, “The very essence of this town has penetrated my soul through the soles of my feet. The town has almost tripled in size, yet in 33 years our community connectedness remains little changed.”
Photo Credit : Barbara Peacock
As Peacock looked around Westford for images representing universal experiences in small towns, her own family members sometimes made it into the frame. Here her son, Connor, finds a unique resting spot for onion rings.
Photo Credit : Barbara Peacock
When taking photographs, “I basically have blinders on—like a horse,” Peacock says. For this image from a whipped cream pie eating contest at the summer fair, she arrived out of breath from running to catch the moment.
Photo Credit : Barbara Peacock
![Queens & Minutemen, 2010 Westford’s Apple Blossom Festival has long been one of Peacock’s favorite subjects, since she went every year as a young girl. “At the end of the parade, everyone gathers at the top of the football field, where the Apple Blossom Queen will be crowned…. I saw the juxtaposition [between the minutemen and the girls] and positioned myself so each group had its own identity. I waited for the gunfire, and thought it was funny how most of the girls just carried on in conversation.”](https://newengland.com/wp-content/uploads/Hometown12.jpg)
Westford’s Apple Blossom Festival has long been one of Peacock’s favorite subjects, since she went every year as a young girl. “At the end of the parade, everyone gathers at the top of the football field, where the Apple Blossom Queen will be crowned…. I saw the juxtaposition [between the minutemen and the girls] and positioned myself so each group had its own identity. I waited for the gunfire, and thought it was funny how most of the girls just carried on in conversation.”
Photo Credit : Barbara Peacock
To see more of Barbara Peacock’s work or to buy a copy of her limited-edition book, Hometown, go to barbarapeacock.com.
To view more photos from this feature, see “Scenes from Small-Town Westford, MA | Photographer Barbara Peacock.”
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Great article! Loved seeing all the photographs and the stories behind them. I remember bringing my children to her studio at Easter time and she would photograph the kids with bunny rabbits. Fun memories….
I was born in Westford, MA in 1933. I still remember the smell of apple blossoms in the spring, and the apples in the fall. A journey back a few years ago found the same town green, and the library looks exactly the same. We moved to RI on my eigth birthday. How sweet it was to go back.