Please join us on Friday, May 18, 2018 from 5:00 to 7:00 pm to celebrate the life of B.A. (Tony) King and his works in the recently published Closer to Home.  Images from the book will be on display in the Business Center of the Library for the next six months.  We wish to thank the King Family for this wonderful opportunity to display Tony’s work.  Light refreshments will be served.

For over seventy years, Tony King attentively observed the world around him, capturing it with rare artistry as a photographer and elevating the ordinary in a way that can make anyone see their everyday world with fresh eyes. Known particularly for his iconic pictures of wildlife and the New England landscape, King’s greater breadth is definitively clear in Closer to Home. There are factories here as well as hawks; portraits of the memorable and less memorable as well as rolling pastures; yawning kindergartners as well as early snowfall on toppled fence posts.
In addition to its topical breadth, Closer to Home reveals more clearly than his other books just how central Worcester and its environs had been not simply to his work, but to the most intimate aspects of King’s life. The humor, vitality, repose, pathos, charm, intellect, affection and disarmingly complex simplicity of the images reflect King’s own spirit and character. There is a beguiling seamlessness between person, habitat and picture.
There are more than photographs here—King has been fascinated with words his whole life. Modestly, he called his poem-like prose ‘fragments’ and his maxims ‘sardines’. They reflect King’s conversation with the world around him. Paired with his pictures, that conversation is the richest art imaginable as it reminds us that the world around us has its own magic. King’s “pioneering in place”—discovering for himself how central greater Worcester had been throughout his well-traveled life-works for us all, at any moment, anywhere in the world.