Toward the end of the walkthrough, Michael stopped at the mural design. He talked us through the Gold Star Mothers history behind it, the blue star that families displayed for a service member overseas, replaced with a gold one if that person didn’t come home. The 1928 founding of Gold Star Mothers Inc. The laurel and the constellation lines, meant to turn an ordinary basketball court into something people would actually walk through instead of just past. That night, it read like something almost finished. A design waiting on a court.
It’s still waiting. Routine soil testing at the park turned up lead and other contaminants in August 2025, the same year Michael designed the piece, and the city closed the whole park while it works out a remediation plan. Nobody knows yet when the court reopens, which means nobody knows yet when Realizing Your(e) Gold actually goes on the ground. We photographed the version of it that exists right now, printed and framed on a gallery wall, waiting on dirt to get cleared before it can become what it was actually designed to be.
Most of what we shoot already exists before we get there, the building, the mural, the finished piece. This one is still just a design and a city report. We got there before the mural did.
Michael’s mural will eventually go on that court. When the soil gets cleared and the park reopens, somebody should be there to document it going down, the same way we were there for the design hanging on a wall. That’s the part most people miss about this kind of work. The finished piece gets photographed by everyone. The years of waiting in between usually don’t get photographed by anyone.
That’s most of what we do now, ongoing documentation for the organizations building things in Cambridge rather than one shoot at a time. If you want to see how that plays out across a longer relationship, our work with Cambridge Community Center started with a single event and hasn’t stopped. And if you’re weighing whether your own project needs photos, video, or both, we ran into that exact question at Majestic Yoga Studio and the footage answered it for us.
