Thomas P. Lang

Waltham – Thomas P. Lang, former Head of Photographic Services at the Museum of Fine Arts, died at his home in Waltham on December 13 after a short illness. He was born in New York City in 1937 and spent the formative years of his childhood in Brooklyn. He graduated from St. Peter's College in Jersey City. He spent a year in Korea serving in the U.S. Army Signal Corps.

He moved to Boston at the time of his marriage to his wife Claire. His photographic career began there when he began studying with the renowned photographer Minor White. Through him and other photographers working in the Boston and Cambridge area, he became well-schooled in the art of pure black and white photography. Nevertheless, by virtue of his temperament, his social conscience and his Brooklyn roots, he was drawn to the richness and texture of life in cities-the residents, neighborhoods, street life, feasts and celebrations, architecture and constant changes that are always transforming urban life.

But beyond seeing the photographic potential of urban life for "great photographs" Tom also saw the potential power of a camera in the hands of a young person whose horizons were constrained by the poverty of their lives. Through numerous inner city photographic education programs in Boston and Cambridge, he taught photographic skills and often a photographic eye to school age young people and often young adults. But he also wanted them to know a world beyond their neighborhoods, from which many of his students had rarely ventured. He took them to historic sites, museums, places of natural beauty-often located in settings whose contrasts with their own lives were visible to a photographer, which is what he intended.

During the 1980's, after a period of freelancing for the Museum of Fine Arts and other institutions, he became a full time staff member at the Museum. He eventually became Head of Photographic Services until his retirement in 2005. The Museum was a world apart from the urban neighborhoods that had been the focus of his earlier work. It offered challenging opportunities to practice the exacting demands of fine art photography that he had learned in the earliest years of his photographic education-lighting, composition, perspective that were required for presenting the great art of the MFA. He managed a studio of talented photographers who produced work for publications, archives, who documented the works of private collectors at the museum and on location. However, what Tom loved most were the opportunities to document the life of the museum as carried out by its workers of every level-its director, curators, restorers, exhibition planners, photographers, cleaners, carpenters, guards. He saw the value of all of their work in making the museum the uniquely rich place it was to both visit and work in.

As a 45 year resident of Waltham, Tom found photographic inspiration in this historic industrial city with its own contrasts between its past, present and evolving future. Beginning in the 1970s he became interested in the Robert Treat Paine House, Stonehurst. He was granted access to photograph the interior rooms, the architectural features, the grounds. He was initially drawn to the poignancy of the living quarters, now vacant but still containing traces of the very personal life of a family whose home it once was.

He was certainly aware of the historic significance of the home, designed by H.H. Richardson and its beautiful grounds designed by Frederick Olmstead, but what compelled him the most was the life of Robert Treat Paine himself. He had had a successful business career but chose to re-direct the focus of his life to philanthropy. He was a major force in Boston, directing resources to the solution of the many social problems that accompanied the processes of industrialization, immigration and urbanization. Tom was a person who cared and felt very deeply about such issues and in his later years he was saddened by the fact that the very inequality that had moved Robert Treat Paine in the 19th century were still with us in the 21st century-worsening perhaps. His involvement with the Paine house continued until his death. He was very honored to be a member of the Board of Trustees where he could participate in the generation of ideas and plans to make the Paine House and its beauty accessible and known.

As a photographer he was always looking for and finding the beauty and sometimes the pathos of human existence. His own upbringing had instilled in him the goodness and kindness that everyone who knew him took note of. His parents Peter and Geraldine modeled these qualities for Tom and his sister Patricia and brothers Peter and Richard.

Tom is survived by his wife, Claire, his son Daniel, (and Maria Griggs) his daughter Lucy, (and Byron Lowe) and their two children Olivia and Aiden Thomas Lowe.

Family and friends will honor and remember Tom's life by gathering for calling hours in The Joyce Funeral Home, 245 Main Street (Rte. 20), Waltham on Friday, December 19th from 4 to 8 p.m.

A private memorial service will be held at Stonehurst in late April--a season of great beauty there that Tom so lovingly captured with his camera.

Memorial donations may be made to the Vernon Cancer Center at Newton-Wellesley Hospital, 2014 Washington Street, Newton, MA 02462.