Preservation Movement Grows Sophisticated

The preservation movement grew more sophisticated in the '70s and ’80s as many localities passed preservation ordinances, working in concert with the structure put in place by the National Historic Preservation Act, which created the National Register of Historic Places and the federal, state, tribal, and local partnerships we know today. HAER became so well established that it needed its own photographer. Jack continued with HABS.

From ladders, cherry pickers, even helicopters, Boucher captured the classical, the threatened, the au courant, the quirky, and the forgotten. Books and exhibits featured his photographs.

He stresses the importance of light, and luck. Sometimes pictures took hours of waiting for the right moment, coupled with years of technical savvy. Other times, he says, they happened “by accident.”

Boucher seems less interested in technique than talking about a lifetime on the road. A U.S. Navy sub cut his catamaran in half when he was off the Puerto Rico coast shooting a 16th century fort. Lost on a remote road on his way to New Mexico’s El Morro National Monument, he was greated by a rifle-toting man when knocking on a door to ask for directions. Later that night, awoken inside his tent, he thought the armed stranger was outside, but instead it was the biggest skunk he had ever seen. A helicopter lost power while he was shooting Jamestown from the air, dropping 200 feet before the engine started again.

But Boucher's affinity for story reveals something about his photographs. It is clear that he is intrigued by detail, hue, and nuance. An assignment to photograph Edison Laboratories is not, in his telling, simply taking pictures of the famous inventor’s workplace. It is, in part, the story of his conversation with a man in the company cafeteria, discovering that he is Edison’s son. As Lebovich writes, “Fidelity to the subject is essential, of course, but it is a point of departure, not the entire objective.” Boucher understood the functional parameters of the job. But he also had a gift for turning a two dimensional image into a story, adding what Lebovich calls “the powerfully dynamic realities of architectural space, tactile substance, and stylistic vocabulary.” You see the dormer, the dentilation, the roofline. You sense the era, the mood, the human presence.

When one looks at Boucher’s photographs, one is looking at the growth of HABS and, by extension, the evolution of the preservation movement. On the heels of the NHPA came the National Environmental Protection Act, which included the historic fabric of place in its definition of “environment.” Policy and regulations were refined as federal, state, and local governments professionalized their staffs and became more invested in preservation. The NHPA was amended to empower certified local governments in 1980, and then Native American tribes in 1992.

In the late ’90s, Boucher took part in a survey of Quaker meeting houses in the Delaware Valley, a federally funded documentation of this endangered and little-known legacy. “Jack photographed around 25 of the them,” Lavoie says, “basically 300 years of meeting-house evolution.” The project produced a book, Silent Witness: Quaker Meeting Houses in the Delaware Valley, 1695 to Present, a symposium, and an exhibit at the Athenaeum of Philadelphia. The images are contemplative and stark. They also serve as the perfect evidence of Quaker craft, the arriage of beauty and structure. In Boucher’s lens, the two exist in equal parts.

Writes Pierson, “As in all great artistic performances, technique is the han dmaiden of statement; in the end, it is the building as a work of art that Jack Boucher sees, understands, and celebrates.” Looking through the collection at the Library of Congress, one gets a powerful sense of Jack’s legacy to the nation. In Boucher’s pictures of America he has given us both an evidentiary document and a dream of the past.

The HABS/HAER collection at the Library of Congress, on the web at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/collections/habs_haer, is an unequalled archive of American history. While preservation professionals and historians find it invaluable for research, others discover in it a passage to the past. “Many people have a fondness for anything American,” writes Lebovich in A Record in Detail, “and find the collection a fascinating way to see this country.” The collection, which covers the entire nation, is in many cases the only record of buildings that have been destroyed.