I took this photo about 6 years ago in the South End/Boston at the Titus Sparrow Park.
I lived in that area for four years before I moved to Cambridge. Every year at Easter time people from that neighborhood celebrate an Easter Egg Hunt. It is really a hunt, less a search. The idea is simple. Drop a few hundred or thousand eggs on a lawn, put some police tape around them and when the time comes you start a collecting frenzy that empties this field within ten seconds. The toughest, fastest, oldest kid will most likely get the most out of it. Whatever happened to building little nests and to hide eggs behind trees, bushes, and in between flowers? I remember that sometimes we found eggs months after Ester because they were so perfectly hidden that nobody could remember their location anymore.
I used a Wista 4×5 camera to capture the moment before the hunt. The kids are still calm and the 4×5 slide allows you to zoom in and look at the individuals and their stories. Yesterday I went their again and the hunt is still the same. One year they changed it. The park was under construction so they filled a tennis court with all the eggs. Have a good weekend, whatever you do. D!RK
PS Yesterday I went to another site in Cambridge. There they didn’t allow kids to have baskets anymore and handed out blue plastic bags. The reason was that they didn’t want any kid to collect a lot more eggs than other kids. Please stop reasoning.
