About This Collection

A commercial photographer in Boston for 40 years, I nonetheless have always made personal photography projects a part of my life. I started shooting with a Kodak Brownie when I was about 5 years old, the following Christmas I “upgraded” to an “Imperial Lark” plastic camera (I still have it). But it wasn’t until after I got out of high school and went backpacking through Europe that photography became a serious habit and eventually a career.

In the 1970’s, working in Boston as a studio assistant and photo lab printer, I would spend my spare time shooting street photography, landscapes, abstract images, and for a period of time, wrestling.

The winter of 1977 - 78 I was given access to wrestling events at the Boston Garden and came to know Walter “Killer” Kowalski. Walter, a famous wrestler, was also an amateur photographer who happened to buy photo supplies at the same Boston pro store that I did. A friend who worked at the store knew I was shooting wrestling at the Garden and got us together. Although Walter was semi-retired from wrestling, he would still work events at the Garden as the “Masked Executioner”. (Many older wrestlers who wanted to stay in the sport but not travel the “circuit” as their known persona would work as the mysterious “Masked Executioner”)

During that time I organized, printed, and hung a gallery exhibit of Walter’s work which was, as you might guess, photos of wrestlers, at the “Photoworks” gallery in Boston. This was a few years before publication of Walter’s book “Killer Pics”. The image of Walter inside the ring doing the "claw hold", the only wrestling photo I took that was posed, was used on the poster for the Photoworks exhibit.

One time at the Garden, when Walter was just going into the locker room, (off limits to photographers), I got a glimpse of what wrestlers did before going into the ring …playing cards, smoking, talking, drinking a beer. It brought home to me that these guys who traveled to the same venues, worked together, spent years together, were coworkers and friends.

Wrestling is about "heroes” and “villains", (also called "Faces" and "Heels" respectively)  I grew up watching many of these guys on our family's black and white Muntz television, many of them were still wrestling by the time I got to the Garden about 20 years later.  It was common for a wrestler to work well into his 50's.  These were big, tough guys who took a pounding throughout their careers.  It's amazing what they endured, and real lasting injuries were part of the deal.  Many of the wrestlers in this era were not the body - builder types that dominate modern wrestling, a lot of these guys were large but not "ripped", but in the ring they were all business, and the crowds loved it.

The photographs here don’t depict modern wrestling, or as I’ve heard it called, “Rock ‘n Wrestling”, no techno lighting, no surround sound, no supporting cast of characters. These photos show the old Boston Garden, where people could roam freely, smoke, even throw things at the ring when they didn’t like what was happening. This wrestling resembled the black and white version I saw on television growing up.

Although it was still many years before the old Garden would be demolished, even then the venue itself seemed pretty ancient. Kids could sneak in for free (or about $2), there were rumors of a circus monkey living up in the rafters, and some seats were actually behind three-foot-wide columns with no direct view of the arena called “obstructed view”! The old Boston Garden was a treasure.

One of my first decisions when setting out to photograph at the Garden was not to use an on-camera flash, which was how almost all of wrestling was typically photographed, but to work with the existing light in the Garden. This was difficult. Film cameras, unlike their modern digital descendants, are challenging in low light. Shooting 35mm with Nikons or Leicas, then “push processing” the film resulted in very grainy, “noisy” negatives. I tried various combinations of film and developing methods, with mixed results. Stopping action without flash is very difficult. (I didn’t then and still don’t like using flash) Available light lets the background come in, gives depth to the arena, and for me just looks better, but it was challenging to work with.

When I look back on these images a couple of things come to mind. First is that “I wish I could go back and do more”, of course. The second is wondering “how did they let me get that close to the ring action”. There were times, as in the photo of Stan Stasiak and Gorilla Monsoon, that I was probably hanging inside the ropes. Oddly, I was never pushed back, yelled at, told to back off …it was almost like I was invisible. (After the first time I went to an event and the Garden staff saw me, I was able to walk in and out of the Garden without anyone asking me what I was doing… imagine doing that today)

Being that close to the ring action in a full - house event, I also got to hear the wrestlers talking to each other, the refs talking …all the things that the crowd couldn’t hear because it was LOUD in there. And constantly being on the lookout for incoming “missiles” of soda cups and junk when a “heel” was getting his way over the crowd favorite Get hit once with a full cup of soda and you learn fast to “duck and cover”. There was a very intense energy level focused on the ring by a full Garden crowd, an intensity you could feel in more ways then one.

I wanted to photograph the wrestlers, of course, but I also wanted to document the Garden crowd, which meant turning the camera on the seats and getting in the back hallways, trying to get on film the atmosphere, the emotion. A big part of it was my personal interest in the psychology of wrestling. It was a great experience on many levels.

Although I did this work in 1977 and 1978, , until recently (February 2019) I have never showed it in public.  This is something I've wanted to do for several years, but due to time and other work projects it had to sit on the sidelines.  In the last few years I’ve wanted to wait until I had hung the first series of photos at the Boston Sports Museum (in the TD Garden) before bringing the work out …although the original Garden site was adjacent to the new Garden, for me it’s still the Garden. This is where it happened 42 years ago, so this is where it should hang first.

I hope to add more images to this collection in time, and I will add comments on images as they appear. 

I hope you enjoy this, … Please let me know....