Soul of the Outer Cape, an exhibit of portraits by the Boston and Brewster based photographer Edward Boches, will open on July 1, at the Brewster Ladies Library.

For the last three years, Boches has photographed farmers and foragers, chefs and shellfishers, artists and artisans, and writers and musicians in towns of outer Cape Cod. Twenty four black and white images from the ongoing project will be on display in the library’s gallery for the month of July.

A reception, complete with a raw bar by Lucky Lips Oysters and music by local singer songwriter Shannon Davis, will be held on Tuesday, July 5, from 4:30 to 6:30.

Boches’s photography has been shown in numerous museums and galleries including the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester; the Bronx Documentary Center in New York City; the Plymouth Center for the Arts, and in Boston at Harvard’s Crossing Gallery, and the storied Panopticon Gallery.

In 2021 and 2022 he received multiple grants for public art installations for his community based project Postcards from Allston, which raises money for local arts initiatives.

Interested in the ways people live, work, play and struggle, he makes it a point to meet and photograph at least one stranger every day.

ARTIST BIO 

Edward Boches is a Boston and Cape Cod-based street and documentary photographer.

His work has shown in museums and galleries that include the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester; the Bronx Documentary Center in New York City; the Cambridge Association for the Arts; the Plymouth Center for the Arts; the PhotoPlace Gallery in Middlebury, Vermont; the Providence Center for the Photographic Arts; and in Boston at Harvard’s Crossing Gallery, the Bromfield Gallery and Panopticon Gallery.

Boches’s work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Boston Globe, Zeke Magazine and the Provincetown Independent, where he is a regular contributor. Interested in the ways in which ordinary people live, work, play, struggle and take action, he frequently donates his photography to causes and organizations he believes in.

In 2021 and 2022 he received multiple grants for public art installations for his community based project Postcards from Allston, which raises money for local arts initiatives.

He makes it a point to meet and photograph at least one stranger every day.

edwardboches.com @edwardboches

ARTIST STATEMENT

Soul of the Outer Cape

For me, making photographs is as much about connecting with people as it is about creating images. In recent years, I've photographed amateur boxers in the old mill towns north of Boston, young activists in the Black Lives Matter movement, volunteers working in food pantries, Trump supporters and Bernie devotees.

Most of those projects took a documentary – photo journalistic – style approach, where my objective is to be present and invisible, hoping my subjects remain unaware of me and my camera so that the images will feel natural, and take the viewer someplace they may not have been able to go on their own.

But here on Cape Cod, I took a different approach. I sought out farmers and foragers, actors and authors, chefs and shellfishermen (and women), artists and artisans – people who grow the food we eat, play the music we enjoy, write the books we read – and made portraits of my subjects in the places where they live and work. Never asking anyone to pose, or offering direction of any kind, I simply tried to make a picture at the moment I felt I could reveal some small truth about the person in front of the camera.

This exhibit is dedicated to my good friend the late Richard Payne, of Brewster.

– Edward Boches