It’s a photographic truism that the camera loves some faces more than others. Not a few movie stars and fashion models owe their careers to this phenomenon. Some political candidates, too.
The camera also loves some buildings more than others. Sometimes they’re famous, sometimes they’re not. The lens has its reasons reason knows nothing of, as Pascal might have said had he been familiar with f-stops.
The John Hancock Tower — or 200 Clarendon, its name since 2015, but really now, whoever calls it anything but “the Hancock”? — is austerely, sculpturally beautiful: 60 stories of cool, camera-ready elegance. Sept. 29 was the 50th anniversary of its opening.
That that beauty had a notoriously difficult start is part of the building’s mystique. Peter Vanderwarker has 10 photographs of the Hancock in “Tilted/Straight.” The sole black-and-white one shows the building in all its plywood-speckled ignominy from back then.
The show runs through Nov. 3 at Panopticon Gallery. Vanderwarker’s photographs are the “Straight” part, Fern L. Nesson’s the “Tilted.”
Vanderwarker began photographing the Hancock in 1974 and has kept doing so down to the present. In those early years, the windows kept falling out. Ultimately, all 10,344 had to be replaced. Until they were, a lot of plywood replaced a lot of glass. The juxtaposition of such alien materials was a powerful, even shocking, reminder of how much the textures of building elements can differ. (Steve Rosenthal’s “A Symphony in Brick” — see below — offers a further reminder.) Architecture isn’t just about function and form but also tactility.
The wondrous paradox of the Hancock is that its vast volume visually vanishes, almost, thanks to its all-but-demure rhomboid shape and the reflectiveness of its glass facade. Vanderwarker’s photographs excel at capturing the Hancock as mirror. A building that can seem impersonal and almost abstract also becomes an extension of its surroundings. The great architect Louis Sullivan declared that skyscrapers “must be every inch a proud and soaring thing.” That’s the Hancock all right, and these photographs, themselves proud and soaring (and large, 2 feet by 3 feet, or the reverse), convey those qualities.
Nesson has 15 photographs in the show, a third in color, the rest in black-and-white. One of the latter shows the old Hancock building (officially, the Berkeley Building). Most of the structures she shows are, by design, anonymous. Her images, she notes in an artist’s statement, “eschew context” and stress “angularity over location.” That’s part of their excitement. So’s her preference for canted angles and unexpected perspectives — hence “Tilted.”
The Boston Nesson shows is gleaming, depopulated, slightly inhuman. The images are unmatted, with black frames, ranging in size from 16 or 17 inches by 24 inches to 20 inches by 24 inches. That’s not overwhelming in scale, but big enough to mean business.
Just as the camera loves certain buildings more than others, so does it love certain building materials more than others: concrete or stucco, no; clapboard or brick, yes. Steve Rosenthal, perhaps New England’s premier photographer of architecture, made plain his affinity for clapboard with his 2009 book, “White on White: Churches of Rural New England.”
“A Symphony in Brick: Haverhill’s Architectural Legacy” makes no less plain his affinity for brick. It runs through Dec. 4 at the Paul Dietrich Gallery at CambridgeSeven. Rosenthal worked as an architect before switching to photography — which no doubt contributes to the excellence of his images — and the firm where he started was, yes, CambridgeSeven.
The show includes two dozen color photographs of buildings in Haverhill’s Washington Street Shoe District. Most of the pictures are 17 inches by 22 inches, but some are as big as 45 inches by 31 inches. (Architecture photographers appreciate scale and often rely on it.) There’s also a map. The district consists of 51 brick buildings erected within eight months of a fire on Feb. 18, 1882, that burned down most of the structures in the neighborhood. In 1977, the district was added to the National Register of Historic Places.
It’s hard to say which is more remarkable: that the rebuilding was accomplished so quickly (and proudly, “1882″ has been carved into several facades) or that the buildings are so uniformly handsome. It’s true that none of the buildings are famous, as, say the Hancock Tower is. There are probably people in Haverhill who couldn’t identify the Webster Building or Whittier Hotel. But they register with the camera.
Rosenthal sees to that. He photographs the exteriors — all of them brick, many wonderfully detailed — straight on, in bright sunlight, shadowless. There’s no fussiness or anything fancy to his approach. That would distract from the handsomeness of the building, and serving that handsomeness is what Rosenthal seeks to do. He very much succeeds.
On Oct. 15, from 6 p.m.-8 p.m., Fern L. Nesson and Peter Vanderwarker will appear at Panopticon Gallery to discuss their work and the legacy of Henry N. Cobb, architect of the John Hancock Tower.
TILTED/STRAIGHT
At Panopticon Gallery, 502c Commonwealth Ave., through Nov. 3. 781-740-1300, www.panopticongallery.com
A SYMPHONY IN BRICK. Haverhill’s Architectural Legacy: Photographs by Steve Rosenthal
At Paul Dietrich Gallery at CambridgeSeven, 20 University Road, Cambridge, through Dec. 4. 617-492-7000, www.cambridgeseven.com/about/dietrich-gallery
Mark Feeney can be reached at mark.feeney@globe.com.