Lunenburg was founded in 1990 by several Boston-based photographers with the objective of serving as an open forum to discuss issues of contemporary photography. The group was very active in the early nineties meeting on a monthly basis to review and critique works of individual members, as well as to visit local exhibits and photograph sites of interest. We exhibited together at the Zona Gallery, in Cambridge, MA, in 1993.

The name Lunenburg refers back to our first photographic excursion. For that trip we decided to randomly select a location where none of us had been or seen before. With no preconceived images to bias our exercise we set off to photograph this small Massachusetts town.

A few weeks later when we met to review the pictures we had taken on the trip, we discovered to our surprise that our images seemed to be of completely different places. Each of us had transformed Lunenburg in a personal and distinct way reflective of our diversity.

It seemed to us that Lunenburg had become a metaphor for what we, as a group, were trying to achieve: to get to that place where we have not been - a place within our reach, and uniquely different for each of us.

After all, anyone can take pictures. It is the making sense of them that counts. It can make a good photographer look bad and a good photographer look even better. It is made all the more difficult because unlike a jigsaw puzzle there is no completed image on the cover of the box as a guide to the finished product. In the end, there can be many different arrangements of the original image and one can put the raw material of the camera together to form many variations depending upon what is included and what is left out, as well as the juxtapositions of what is left in, what goes next to what.

It is also difficult to hand this responsibility over to someone else, so thanks to the photographers for letting me shuffle the parts around.

Ron Morris is the curator of the exhibit “Lunenburg Revisited”, he is a photographer who lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He earned his masters degree at the Massachusetts College of Art where he also taught. Four of the photographers in this book were his students there. He is currently teaching photography at Newton North High School in Newton, Massachusetts.