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.
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Meg Sher, executive director of the David M. Hunt Library in Falls Village.
“I was a library kid. I walked to the library after school,” she said.
For Sher, the library is as much about the people as it about the books.
“Part of the job I love so much is that running the library is such a community,” she said.
She treasures the relationships she has built, whether recommending books, celebrating accomplishments or helping patrons through difficult times.
“I am thankful that our community is so supportive of the library, unlike what is happening in some other places where librarians are villainized,” Sher said.
Sher takes pride in the Hunt Library’s reputation for being “open and welcoming to everyone. People come in and see things and get pulled into things they weren’t expecting. Our library is seen as a positive force.”
Sher came to Falls Village after being awarded a fellowship at Adamah Farm, then a program of the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center. She worked at pickling, in the greenhouse and later in the development office. She also worked as a nanny.
At the same time, “I was in the library all the time,” she recalled. “I’m a voracious reader. The library is where I met a lot of my first friends in Falls Village.”
She became assistant librarian at Hunt and worked in that position for almost a decade before becoming the executive director four years ago.
Meg Sher, executive director of the David M. Hunt Library in Falls Village.L. Tomaino
Sher met her husband, Adam, while working at Adamah. They had their wedding there in 2012. He now emcees many events which she co-organizes with the Falls Village Recreation Commission.
Sher and her family live near the library.
“It’s an easy commute,” she said with a smile. “My kids run back and forth. I can go home to walk the dog if I need to.”
“My kids have grown up here.” Her oldest son, Eli, “loves volunteering. He helps with Augustfest and often helps set up chairs for ArtWall gatherings.” Her younger son, Noah, is often at events and was eager to taste cookies at last year’s holiday cookie swap.
When she is not at the library, Sher likes to hike with her family. Bella, their Portuguese water dog, often accompanies them.
Sher enjoys seeking out people to offer events at the library.
“I do a lot of different community programming. It is one of my favorite parts of the job.”
Augustfest, featuring food, music and an auction, is the library’s biggest fundraiser.
“This summer we had a record 152 attendees, which was pretty incredible.”
Yonah Sadeh, a filmmaker from Falls Village, inaugurated the VideoWall this year, Sher explained.
“I’ve known Yonah since he was two. It’s wonderful to work with him as an adult.”
The VideoWall complements the library’s ArtWall, which showcases a new artist each month. Sher praised the ArtWall committee for its work and highlighted December’s popular “12x12 Show,” featuring works by local artists, each measuring 12 by 12 inches and priced at $150.
Sher added that some of the artists who exhibit at the ArtWall offer workshops to students at Kellogg School, next door to the library. In September, artist Danielle Mailer worked with the children. Vincent Inconiglios taught a class last November.
Being next to the school, said Sher, is a great advantage.
“Kids are coming after school, to see friends, work on projects, find a great book. Kids that love the library end up using the library as grownups.”
This past year, in partnership with Adamah, the library and school created a garden, with excess produce made available at The Center on Main.
This year is Sher’s second year participating in the Troutbeck Symposium in Amenia with James King, director of the library at Salisbury School. The Troutbeck Symposium is “a gathering of a year of student historical inquiry across the region” in which students “uncover stories that have been overlooked, forgotten, or never recorded.”
Last year, Sher and King began a project with a group of students researching Irish immigrants in Falls Village, exploring ancestry and creating small magazines about their findings.
They continued this year, visiting St. Patrick’s Catholic Cemetery on Dublin Road, cleaning seven gravestones and even righting one with the help of stonemason and gravestone restoration expert Karl Munson. Paul Kozeazny, a representative of the Catholic archdiocese, helped secure access to the site.
A film documenting their activities will be shown at the symposium in spring 2027.
A full schedule of programs and events, ranging from tech help to ceramic mug-making, can be found on the library’s website.
Despite spending her days surrounded by books, and a busy schedule of programming, Sher still loves to settle in with a book at home.
For more information on library programs and events, visit huntlibrary.org
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Touré was born in northern Mali in 1981. His father, the renowned guitarist Ali Farka Touré, came from a family of soldiers and wanted his son to join the army. The younger Touré studied drums and the calabash and practiced guitar in secret. He earned his father’s blessing to pursue music shortly before Ali died in 2006, and they played two tracks together on Vieux’s debut album.
Touré is known for his deft, polyrhythmic playing, and his songs grow out of riffs that repeat and layer to hypnotic effect. He draws on rock, blues, Latin music and various African traditions. This distinctive blend builds on his father’s work adapting the sonic traditions of Mali’s arid north to the guitar.
Vieux’s album “Mon Pays” (“My Country,” 2013) honored Mali’s culture after Tuareg separatists and extremist groups seized the north in 2012. “Samba” (2017) was recorded before about 50 listeners in Woodstock, New York. In 2022 came “Les Racines” (“The Roots”), a return to his father’s desert blues, and “Ali,” on which he and the trio Khruangbin reworked eight of the elder Touré’s songs.
Touré leads the Ali Farka Touré Foundation, which focuses on cultural and educational work in Mali. Around the anniversary of Ali’s death, it holds a festival in Bamako, Mali’s capital. Bamako has been under blockade for much of the past year, besieged by JNIM, an al-Qaeda affiliate. Against this backdrop, Touré continues to carry the music of Mali to audiences abroad.
At the Nov. 5 concert, Touré’s desert blues will share the bill with Gnawa, the music LanGus plays, which developed in Morocco among West Africans who were brought north across the desert as enslaved people. Gnawa is religious music traditionally performed at all-night healing ceremonies called lila, intended to carry participants into trance.
Samir LanGusProvided
LanGus was born and raised outside Agadir, Morocco, and began learning Gnawa from its masters at age 8. He plays the sintir, a three-stringed bass lute made of wood and camel skin. The player strikes a low string with the thumb to create a deep, resonant pulse. Iron castanets clatter over the sintir’s bass line, and vocalists trade call-and-response refrains.
LanGus infuses the tradition with jazz and improvisation. In New York, he founded the ensemble Innov Gnawa. His first solo album, “Gnawa Love,” came out in February.
Touré and LanGus’s Nov. 5 concert is one of the last public events at Race Brook Lodge, which is for sale and ended full-service operations at the end of 2025. The lodge’s final scheduled event, on Nov. 6, is an evening of Rumi’s poetry with translator and vocalist Haleh Liza Gafori, cellist Isabel Castellvi and ceremonial bard James Bird.
For tickets, visit rblodge.com.
James FitzGerald is a student at Yale Law School, where he focuses on ecological restoration and international environmental cooperation. He splits his time between Lakeville and New Haven.
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