The exhibition
Made for the paper, reconsidered in the museum.
The exhibition's more than eighty digital prints were made and loaned by Arnie Jarmak. Together, they drew from an archive of more than 20,000 negatives.
McMullen Museum of Art · 2022
Photographing Chelsea in Transition, 1977–89
The McMullen Museum of Art presented more than eighty photographs from September 6 through December 4, 2022. Curated by Diana Larsen and Ash Anderson, the exhibition brought a newspaper archive into a museum setting without severing it from the people and city that gave it meaning.
The curators' view
Persistence and transformation.
The McMullen Museum presents the Chelsea photographs as a compassionate record of persistence and transformation, made without reducing residents to the crises around them. The museum situates the work within Chelsea's changing immigrant, industrial, religious, and neighborhood life, emphasizing both continuity and new arrivals.
Arnie credits Diana Larsen with recognizing what he was trying to say through the photographs and helping open a new museum chapter for the work.
Exhibition guide
Read the wall texts and object labels.
Boston College's 36-page guide brings together the exhibition's photographs, objects, labels, and curatorial essays.
Read the exhibition guide ↗Beyond the exhibition
Explore the wider archive.
Digital Commonwealth offers a broader view of the Arnold Jarmak Collection for researchers, students, and anyone interested in Chelsea's history.
Explore the full Digital Commonwealth collection ↗Chelsea in transition
A guided reading of a changing city.
Six themes follow the McMullen Museum's exhibition. The final section gathers a recurring thread in Arnie's work: children and community life.
The Chelsea Record
A daily-paper practice made Jarmak a familiar figure in the city and left a public record of its routines, readers, staff, and streets.
Setting the Scene
Maps, landmarks, waterfronts, and views from above situate Chelsea's streets, shoreline, and layered history.
The Fire Brigade
Fire photographs hold the human aftermath, responders, and fragile housing conditions in view rather than treating disaster as spectacle.
Political Machinations
Election nights, petitions, officials, and local power make civic life part of the same documentary record as street portraits and work.
A City in Transition
Storefronts, housing, religious spaces, industry, and immigration trace a city changing without flattening its overlapping communities into a single story.
Faces of Chelsea
Closely observed portraits grew from relationships, familiarity, and attention to people as participants in their own city rather than anonymous subjects.
A recurring theme
Children and Community Life
Children at play, school, worship, and neighborhood gatherings register a lively public culture alongside the city's difficult material conditions.
Museum video
Newspaper photographs, reconsidered
In this excerpt, beginning at 20:08, curator Diana Larsen reflects on the way photographs made for a newspaper take on a different life when seen as works of art.
Open the museum video at 20:08 ↗ · View the complete video on YouTube ↗
Virtual exhibition
Step inside the McMullen exhibition.
Move through the galleries and revisit the 2022 exhibition in Boston College's virtual tour.