INFocus Camera Club of  Boston

Mission Hill:

Presence, Absence and Transformation

 

To see Mission Hill is to look beyond the surface, to overlays of space and time, sign and signified, presence and absence.

 

Members of the INFocus Camera Club have different connections to Mission Hill. Some of us are occasional visitors seeing the neighborhood with fresh eyes. Others are past residents, or current residents who’ve been living in the neighborhood for a long time. All of us apply ourselves to the craft of photography, engaged by the neighborhood, especially by whatever triggers the act of looking more closely.

 

In photographs taken over the past six years, club members see in what’s plainly visible, but also something else, whether it reflects Mission Hill or resonates with another place or time. To stop and look at numbers on houses and names on front doors is to see a story of neighborhood transition, in which the present—or at least the more recent—stands out as a makeshift improvisation. For the photographer, the connection is objective, but also subjective.

At Diablo Glass School, the eye is drawn to base materials and tools, but also to the fluid incandescence of one thing becoming something else, even how it flows from the grip of the arm and hand of the artist. The byproducts are more refined, like the school itself, converted from a plant that once made machine parts.

In other transformations, chairs are exiled to stand guard over a parking space. Even when people are not visible, they are implied—or implicated. A space outside the Tobin School can look deserted, but it is also populated by the faces of students in a mural--an image that, over time, can fade or be outgrown.

 

To see can also mean to observe what’s not usually noticed. Trees flower every spring in McLaughlin Park, at the top of the hill, but they’re rarely encountered in the dead of night in a deserted playground. With its uncanny play of intense light and darkness, what’s visible here draws attention to what is not, upending the normal distinctions between day and night or time of the year, even between the ominous and the serene.

Under snow, the particular of Mission Hill merges with the universal. As its dimensions and boundaries dissolve, a man walking along Tremont street stops to bow and pray outside the Mission Church. Clutching his jacket against the wind and the faint patter of snowfall, he is turned toward the puddingstone, toward what is present and absent, visible and not.

 

Chris Lovett

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History of Mission Hill, Boston

Once part of the Town of Roxbury, Mission Hill is a former “streetcar suburb,” an extension of city and countryside, if only in microcosms of land or features of design. The present-day urban neighborhood is tightly packed with multi-story buildings, often divided by chain-link fences, defended by wrought-iron, or signed with graffiti. Whether it is a long-term home with the feel of a community, or a transitional adjunct to higher education, the residential is never all that far from the industrial or the institutional, the personal from the impersonal, the material from the aspiration.

True to its name, Mission Hill is very much defined by topography. Streets slope, curve and slant with the land mass, or come to an abrupt stop. Starting from the late 1800s, the proliferation of brick rowhouses and three-deckers made it possible for more people to live near public transit or jobs, including those at breweries near Stony Brook in Roxbury and Jamaica Plain. On a similar scale was the Romanesque Revival Mission Church, serving German and Irish immigrants, and built with material from the neighborhood, Roxbury puddingstone.

By the mid-20th century, Mission Hill would become home for African-American, Latino and Asian residents, just as the area was increasingly sought after for institutional expansion or base for students.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the diverse population includes long-term residents, people in transition, or people who identify with the neighborhood because they lived there in the past.

What remains the same is the feel of a separate place, whether in tight quarters at close range or panoramic distance from the rest of the city.

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