capeannmuseum: One cannot view or research within the Museum’s photographic archives without acknowledging the dedication and expertise of CAM’s former Photo Archivist, the late Fred Buck. Fred was a champion of not only Charlie Lowe’s work, but all local photographers, as is evidenced by the tens of thousands of digitized photographs in CAM’s collection. Upon completion of processing the Lowe collection, Fred took a moment to share what the photographer meant to him and his life:
“In the summer of 1969, my wife and I spent three months in Gloucester staying with my mother who had moved into an apartment on Fort Square a few doors down from poet Charles Olson, who was an old family friend from our days at Black Mountain College.
Chatting in the street outside his house one day, Charles opened up a copy of the ‘Gloucester Daily Times’ he was carrying and pointed to a photo on the front page. He said, ‘See that? That’s Charlie Lowe’s. You study that guy – he knows more about Gloucester than any of the scribblers in here…’ I don’t remember what the photo was, but I’m sure it was a corker. Most of them were. When we moved to Gloucester the following year I studied Charlie Lowe every time I opened the newspaper – not because someone told me to, but because his photographs were headturners, and often had more to say than the thousand words that went with them…”
Continue reading Fred’s note on page 6 of the Charles A. Lowe Negatives and Photographs Collection Finding Aid at the link in our bio or at www.capeannmuseum.org/research/finding-aids
Good Morning Gloucester 