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Photos courtesy John Gregory estate
John Gregory at home in 1980 with some of his photographs and the camera he used. |
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“Calm Harbor” by John Gregory shows the former weirs in Provincetown Harbor that were used by the local fishermen. |
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John Gregory: Was he
Cape Cod’s own Ansel Adams?
Cape Museum show sparked
by one collector’s zeal
Gerry Desautels
BANNER CORRESPONDENT
“Old photographers never die, they just look that way,” wrote the late Provincetown photographer John “Jack” W. Gregory. The quote encapsulates the wry irreverence of a humble artist who, just five years before his death in 1992, would get around to publishing a soft-cover booklet of his best-selling black and white prints. The book, “Provincetown by the Sea,” would be his swan song, immortalizing 30 of his best-selling prints from a lifetime of work, almost sixty years of immersing himself in photographing his beloved seaside village.
As a Provincetown resident for nearly six decades, Gregory touched the lives of so many, but it took the fanaticism of an avid Boston collector to inspire a new show of the artist’s work — 13 years after Gregory’s death — opening this Saturday at the Cape Cod Museum of Art (CCMA) in Dennis. The show, entitled “John Gregory: Coastal Reflections,” hangs through May 8 and embodies the 20-piece collection of Henry Santoro, an avid art and cookbook collector and news director of Boston’s FNX Radio Network, who became enraptured with Gregory’s work after seeing one of his photos — a famous portrait of fisherman John Gaspie — in the Provincetown Seafood Cookbook.
Santoro’s enchantment with cookbooks (he’s amassed over 5,000 at his Brookline home) led him to also fall in love with Gregory’s work, which was virtually taken for granted here in his adopted hometown.
“I loved the Gaspie portrait in the book, and once I found out it was taken by Gregory, I started doing a search. I got my first piece on eBay and the race was on. Immediately I began to buy any Gregory photo or lithograph I could find,” says Santoro, a summer resident of Dennis. “Nobody captured the personality of Provincetown better than John Gregory. And he did it by focusing his camera on the landscape, the seascape and the sky. To me, Gregory was the Ansel Adams of Cape Cod.”
“We don’t have all the photographs he took, but we have most of the negatives, some of which are deteriorating,” says Gregory’s son, Kenny, a Provincetown carpenter. “He also took a great many school portraits. He was very good at portrait photography. I used to help move lighting for his portrait sittings until one day a couple came in and wanted the wife shot in the nude. I wasn’t allowed to help out on that one.
“My father and John Gaspie were great drinking buddies. They used to go to Cookie’s Tap (the current site of Lorraine’s) and drink quite a lot; he was able to talk Gaspie into growing a beard and wearing his wide-brimmed hat for his portrait which became pretty well known.”
Still, Gregory remained modest and “a little shy…preferring to quote artists and writers he considered more gifted than himself.” Born in Brooklyn in 1903, son of a hardnosed newspaper editor, Gregory flew the coop and studied at the Art Student’s League in New York City and with celebrated artist John Sloan. Gregory’s own star would rise early on, when in 1936 he was named as one of the 73 most noteworthy graphic artists in the country.
After leaving New York in the early1930s, Gregory wandered to Cape Cod and met his native Provincetown wife Adelaide Gibbs, a Boston and New York concert pianist. Eventually the newlyweds bought the Seth Nickerson House at 72 Commercial Street, the oldest house in Provincetown, built in 1746, where the Gregorys lived until both of their deaths in 1992. He shared his long-running love affair with Provincetown with his wife and with his older sister and surrogate childhood mother, Dorothy Lake Gregory, an accomplished illustrator married to famed Provincetown painter Ross Moffett.
The Gregorys had two sons, Kenneth and Jack, and the couple was faced with supporting their new family. Adelaide gave piano lessons and John took student class photos for the local schools and shot portraits of U.S. Navy men stationed on ships in Provincetown harbor during World War II. Weddings also became part of his repertoire; and together the Gregorys opened up their historic home for personal tours with commentary and a convenient pass-through the artist gallery. Candlelight piano concerts also proved popular while a tea salon fell by the wayside. The Gregorys were artists and survivors of the Depression, doing what was necessary to feed their family.
But the sensitive, poetic artist-photographer only had to shuffle over to the portrait studio in his home to capture the moods of local residents and tourists or simply cross the street and capture the forever changing and moving live canvas of water and sky along the ocean bayfront.
Perhaps the pinnacle of Gregory’s career came in 1948 when he was awarded a one-man show at the Smithsonian Institution and recognized as one of the finest pictorial photographers in America. Reproductions of his work appeared in the New York Times, Time magazine, and later some of his photographs were featured in a PBS documentary on playwright Eugene O’Neill. Today, seven of Gregory’s photos remain in the Smithsonian’s permanent collection; three other works are held at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum.
“I knew John Gregory when I was a boy,” remembers Toby Everett, the “Old Guy” of Eric Williams’ WOMR Radio Experience. “I would see him riding his Raleigh bicycle up Commercial Street or find him across from his house by the beach at the West End Racing Club. He usually carried a camera, but he was not one to shoot a thousand shots hoping for a good one. His work was planned, careful, conceptual, and specific.”
Gregory is best remembered for his timeless maritime tableaus of Provincetown and nearby North Truro — classic scenes witnessed by generations over, and others still to come. Gregory simply enhanced and accentuated what nature achieved on its own in color, the knowing resident artist translating the color imagery into rich textures and nuances of silver, ebony, gray and white.
“It was never very easy to make money around here, but he started taking pictures of Navy personnel, and that helped the family income,” says Kenny Gregory. “He would sell anything, but usually for lower than what his art was really worth.”
Even today, Gregory’s prints leave us marveling and reaching back into Provincetown history. The work helps us to remember and appreciate both extinct and enduring natural and manmade town landmarks: the former Cabral Pier destroyed by fire; the large anchors on the beach of Captain Jack’s Wharf; Flyer’s and Taves’ boat yards; Beach Point basked in silvery, stormy light; the West End harbor prior to the building of the Coast Guard Wharf; Sal’s Wharf; and the U.U. Meeting House spire. Still others serve to suggest a fishing era gone by like his beautiful “Calm Harbor” featuring formerly used fishing weirs off the West End beaches.
And based on stories by his the son, one can easily assume that Gregory was artfully resourceful when it came to achieving the perfect shot. In his photo “Fog over Provincetown,” Kenny points out that the three flying seagulls hovering above the fishing boat were actually drawn in by his father. “He always liked to have some kind of movement.” In another photo — “Parson Gull” — in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institution, the gull with wildly arched wings is actually stuffed. Such secret artistic licenses beg the thought “what would Gregory have done with digital photography?”
“At first it would have stymied him,” according to Kenny, “but eventually he would have really gotten into it. I just know it.”
For his day, Gregory proved to be a technical master who self-developed the bulk of his negatives. Always generous, Gregory was quick to share tips and reflections on the trade in his treatise on photography printed in “Provincetown by the Sea.” He offered, “From the creative viewpoint, depicting nature in black and white is not a limitation… [where] we can bring out better one of the most fundamentals applying to fine objective painting, graphic art and photography, and that is the lightest light, and the darkest dark…”
Santoro agrees and sees what Gregory so subtly achieved in his lifetime. “I’m honored that the museum is showing my entire collection. They see the same thing that I saw in this work…He’s been gone over a decade, and we have to start remembering him for the artist that he was.”
“We all know that we cannot achieve the impossible, human perfection — but how thrilling it is when we have come close,” wrote Gregory. “Your purpose as a photographer is to create an emotion about the world through what has been observed and carefully selected. You must be moved yourself before you can move others.”
Also showing at the Cape Cod Museum of Art—Joyce Johnson: A Retrospective; and Katherine Ann Hartley: Of Time and Light: Still Life Paintings. For more information on museum exhibits, visit HYPERLINK "http://www.cmfa.org" www.cmfa.org or call 508-385-4477.
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In the Arts
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Mar 10th, 2005