Picture the Intangible

by Joe Flanagan

You can’t escape the sensation that something is going on that does not lend itself to language. The pictures are alive with the intangible thing that is history. That is largely due to the man who took them. Jack Boucher of the NPS Historic American Buildings Survey just ended a 50-year career as the agency’s much acclaimed photographer of historic sites. His work not only helped set the standard for architectural documentation, but is widely admired for its artistry. Boucher’s images trace the arc of the preservation movement; its concerns, in any given decade, apparent in his lens. Colonial, vernacular, Victorian, industrial–he captured places invaluable to the American narrative. Through thousands of photographs, innumerable miles on the road, and untold hours chasing the light, Boucher produced a body of work that is nothing less than a portrait of American history. His career was intertwined with the growth of HABS, the nation’s oldest federal preservation program, singular in terms of its scope and the accessibility of what it has produced–a wealth of histories accompanied by images like Boucher’s, online and on the shelves at the Library of Congress. As the survey examined our past, Jack Boucher served as its eyes.

Boucher, the son of a New Jersey newspaperman, joined the National Park Service in 1958, having refined his skills as an Atlantic City news photographer and as the official lensman for the construction of the Garden State Parkway. He arrived at a time when postwar prosperity had elevated newness to exalted heights. Space was the new frontier and hardly anyone was looking back along the superhighways then spreading across America.

The National Park Service was preparing for its 50th anniversary–coming up in 1966–with a major initiative to fix aging facilities and construct visitors centers to accommodate the newly mobile car culture. Mission 66, as it was known, brought an influx of investment into the parks. The agency began in earnest to care for a new class of property–historic sites–places increasingly the focus of scholarly study needing the expertise that HABS could bring to bear.

The survey, begun in 1933 as a New Deal project to employ out-of-work architects, became a joint initiative of the National Park Service, the American Institute of Architects, and the Library of Congress. Its goal was a nationwide inventory of historic buildings, documented with measured drawings, large-format photography, and research reports. World War II and the Korean War interrupted the effort, and by the time it resumed in the mid-’50s, large sections of cities were being demolished in the name of urban renewal.

Into this scene stepped Jack Boucher, to serve part-time with HABS and part-time with the National Park Service Branch of Stills and Motion Pictures, a public relations organ touting Mission 66.

Boucher says his job was, in part, “to take pictures of people enjoying the parks.” He headed out in his own car on a six-month tour of the West, towing a trailer that served as a darkroom, fitted with developing sinks cut into modified card tables.

Flush with resources and a new sense of mission, HABS teams recorded a host of National Park Service historic sites: Independence Hall, Harpers Ferry, the John Quincy Adams House, and others. Boucher’s knowledge of historic architecture–he’d been active in the New Jersey preservation scene–proved an asset. So did his experience with large-format photography, the standard for architectural documentation. HABS’ Depression-era work tended to focus on pre-Civil War structures, especially those of colonial times. Now, in the wake of urban renewal, the definition of “historic” grew more encompassing. Mission 66 gave HABS a freer rein, with the survey eventually taking in the landmarks of the modern movement that helped spawn the postwar transformation.

This was the environment in which Boucher honed his craft. A reinvigorated HABS reinstituted one of the approaches of its early days: the regional survey. Depression-era teams had recorded Native American pueblos and Spanish missions in the Southwest, neoclassical mansions in the South, and a host of other regional building forms. Picking up that strategy again in the late ’50s, HABS teams traveled to Vermont to document 18th and 19th century buildings, surveyed old New England textile mills, and recorded the imperiled early high-rise architecture of Chicago, where the loss was so alarming that the city became a key battleground in the fight for preservation.

There were stirrings in Washington that would culminate in the landmark National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, but the road there would be littered with the rubble of history. According to a soon-to-be-published history of the survey, “The rapid pace of redevelopment created a moment of awareness [that went] from the local areas affected to the upper echelons of government.” Increasingly, HABS was called on to record structures facing the wrecking ball. A federally appointed committee, whose report–illustrated in part with Jack’s work–led to the Act, likened the growing HABS documentation to a roll call of the lost, calling the survey one of the bright spots in an otherwise bleak landscape.

Toting his bulky equipment, this was the landscape that Boucher traveled. His camera, though intended solely for documentation, became a tool to evoke the aura of the past. He relied mostly on the 5x7 format, to capture detail, produce high quality enlargements, and correct the perspective distortion inherent in photographing large or tall structures. It was also conducive to showing a structure in context–often a building in relation to its landscape–a Boucher forté.