Franco images at gallery

SALISBURY — Photographer Angel Franco is many people, and he goes by many names. Most people call him Franco (pronounced more like Fronco, with a slight Latin trill on the R).“If you can pronounce Angel, call me that,” he says. But of course that’s not angel like the ones in heaven and on Valentine cards, but on-Hel (with a slight Latin burr on the H). Or if you know him really well, from the old days growing up in the outer boroughs of New York City, you might call him Pichi, pronounced like peachy. “Pichi, not Peach,’” he emphasizes. “Don’t call me Peach.”Franco is, by day, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist who chronicles everything from inner city squalor to Fashion Week for his employer, The New York Times. But the images he will display at The Hotchkiss School’s Tremaine Gallery (which opens with a reception this Saturday, March 26) show a different side.Franco is above all approachable, even adorable, a soft-spoken gentle man who speaks not just with his hands and his mobile face but also with every part of his body, especially his eloquent shoulders. He and his wife, Leslie, have been part-time residents of Salisbury for the past eight years. The portraits in this show of two dozen works are not of pastoral New England but of New Yorkers who are, for the most part, defiant, angry, intimidating and, almost universally, damaged. They are people without a voice, Franco explained last weekend, as he and Hotchkiss photography teacher Robert Haiko put the finishing touches on the exhibition. And in this show, called Invisible New Yorkers, he hopes to give them a chance to express something about their lives that would otherwise remain unspoken.It’s not just their faces that speak to the viewer from these grainy 20-by-20 prints. Franco also posted beside each image a photocopy of a page from his personal journal, which he takes with him when he wanders the streets of New York with his camera (usually a Hasselblad SWC; “It’s small so you can get right up in someone’s face, and it’s very quiet, it doesn’t whir or click. People can ignore it.”).He pastes a small black and white test photo in the notebook (using thick black gaffers tape). And he hands his journal to the subject of his photo and asks, “What are your dreams, hopes, desires? What are your secrets?”Some of the answers sprawl on for one or two pages. Some of the answers are just a stick figure or a sketch. One apartment-bound elderly woman drew a sketch of a house with a backyard and a walkway, the house and yard she yearns for but will never have. Another elderly woman hosts a jazz brunch weekly in memory or her son, who died years ago. A beautiful young woman with penetrating eyes and thick, wild, curly hair describes the pleasure she gets from oral sex with her “clients,” because of the power it gives her over them.One of the only images in the show that doesn’t feature a face shows Rafael Gonzalez, dressed like Jesus and hanging from a cross in the Bronx. Every year, he recreates Christ’s Passion and the stages of the cross. A casual visitor to Franco’s show here probably would not get the full backstory on these people and their lives. The images on their own are sufficiently eloquent, and certainly the notebook pages add another dimension. But to fully experience Franco’s work, it’s especially good to have him explain it himself. He will be at the opening reception on Saturday, March 26, from 4 to 6 p.m.Battle at Fort Sumter April 6LAKEVILLE — Edwin Cole Bearss, retired chief historian of the National Park Service, will deliver a public lecture in Katherine M. Elfers Hall in the Esther Eastman Music Center at The Hotchkiss School on Wednesday, April 6, at 7 p.m. Bearss’ lecture, “Fury at Fort Sumter: The Opening Act of a Grand Terrible Drama,” observes the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War in Charleston, S.C. This lecture is free and open to the public.