MANSFIELD -- Bruce Packert so loved taking black-and-white photographs, he refused to let anyone develop his negatives.

He always had a darkroom. The first was at his parents' home in the Wollaston section of Quincy; then, as an Air Force senior photographer, he had a laboratory while stationed in Germany.

He even began building a darkroom in the basement of his West Street home. Sadly, he died before it was finished.

"He said the fun of it was taking a photograph and watching it develop," Packert's widow, Joan, recalled earlier this week.

"It was like going from nothing to something." Now, Joan has had her late husband's negatives developed.

On exhibit

Photos are on exhibit at two local galleries: The Next Door Gallery at Happy Hollow Frame Shop in downtown Mansfield, and Custom Art Framing and Gallery in Norwood. The Mansfield Holiday Inn hosted a similar exhibit last September.

Most of the shots are from the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s and of long-gone sites in Boston and the South Shore: the original Howard Johnson's restaurant, located in a former drugstore in Wollaston; the construction of the Southeast Expressway during the 1950s; and the Squantum Naval Air Station, where Bruce Packert was an airman in the U.S. Naval Reserves from 1948 until 1950 and as an airman/1st class in the Air Force from 1951 until 1955.

"He's got negatives from the 40s of Squantum Naval Air Station," Joan said. "Some of them have little imperfections on them."

Joan also has established a business, Photos by B.D. Packert.

A sharper view

The exhibits provide a sharper view into a man who was never without a camera.

"It lets them see a little bit more of who he was," Joan said.

"My husband was the type of person who, when he did his photographs, they were primarily for him." Bruce's fascination with photographs started long before he was old enough to develop them.

"I have a picture of him, he couldn't be more than 6 or 7 years old, and there he is with his little Brownie box camera by his side," she said.

Bruce owned at least four cameras, and "I know he's got more than that, but I can't find them."

Ironically, he never took a photography class, although he was in photography clubs in school.

"He just had such a way of photographing what people see," Joan said. "His photography was a work of art because of the way he stayed with it.

"He'd remember, 'At this time of day, the light's going to hit that.'"

Bruce took his cameras everywhere: trips to California and Niagara Falls, and to Germany, where he was stationed with the Air Force during the Korean conflict.

He even took them on dates.

"You didn't just go out with Bruce. You took his cameras, too," Joan said.

Joan and Bruce met through some friends at Northeast Airlines. Both of them worked there, Bruce as an aircraft mechanic.

They met at Bruce's parents' house in Wollaston during a July 4 weekend.

"And then he called me, asked me out, and I started going out with him and all his cameras," Joan said.

The couple would have celebrated its 50th wedding anniversary in May, and they have two children, Lisa and David.

But Bruce took fewer photographs - and none of Mansfield - after the kids were born and he began working as a maintenance mechanic for, appropriately, Polaroid Corp. He retired in 1993 after 28 years there.

Still, he never truly quit being a photographer. He even bought a video camera.

"He kind of enjoyed it," Joan said. "When we went out to Venice, I think he spent the whole day just taking pictures."

He began building a darkroom in the basement of their West Street home about 30 years ago.

He never quite finished it; the water is not connected.

Days before he died, Bruce turned to Joan and said, "I wonder what happened to my negatives."

"I found them over 2 years later," she said.

And she did what her husband refused to let others do: let someone else develop his pictures.

"The more I had done," Joan said, "I couldn't believe how good they were."

MICHAEL GELBWASSER can be reached at 508-236-0372 or at mgelbwasser@thesunchronicle.com.