BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS.- The Deans Gallery presents “Farland: Rural Spaces near Boston. -Photographs by Tony Loreti”, on view through May 1, 2002. The landscape has been a significant part of my photography since the late 1980's. A lot of this work has concerned small-scale landscapes in the urban environment ­ pictures made in Boston, Brookline, and particularly Cambridge where I live. In 1998 I began making pictures farther out from the city, in places like those I had spent a lot of time in when I was growing up in Wenham, Massachusetts. I had been doing a lot of reading about agriculture and our cultural relationship to the land, and I came across an early picture I had taken in Wenham that struck me ­ of asparagus for sale standing in a metal bowl on an old wooden table by the side of the road. I decided to return to this kind of environment from earlier in my life to make pictures of the farmland that was still there. Part of my motivation was my concern for these spaces. Population growth and expanding development have left many of them as small oases. I also see them as vestiges of a time when food production was more immediate to most people's lives. But my main interest was the pleasure of being in these places, having the opportunity to walk in them and work at translating their visual beauty ­ their organic sensuality ­ into two-dimensional photographic form.