PR: Stephen DiRado, Better Together: Four Decades of Photographs

This career retrospective exhibition features the work of Stephen DiRado, the leading contemporary artist and fine art photographer in Central Massachusetts. DiRado has taught photography at Clark University in Worcester since 1982, and his work has been exhibited, collected, and published internationally for over forty years. In 2012, he was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for excellence in the creative art of photography.

Throughout his career, DiRado has worked in series, usually spanning many years and involving thousands of images, representing communities of people in Worcester and Martha’s Vineyard. His photographic practice is intimately intertwined with his life – DiRado carries a camera everywhere and makes photographs every day. He operates within many of the great art historical traditions – portraiture, landscape, still life, and the nude. Through an aesthetic that combines realism and symbolism, he evokes deep human emotions like joy, melancholy, boredom, sensuality, vulnerability, compassion, and most of all, love.

DiRado also creates striking images of the night sky, connecting celestial events with the earth and communities of human observers.

DiRado’s aesthetic has been forged by his experiences with photography in his youth. Photographs played an important role in the culture of his large, extended Italian family, memorializing gatherings, celebrations, and vacations. As a young man, DiRado was employed as a photojournalist by the Marlborough Enterprise-Sun, and in the early 1980s attended the Massachusetts College of Art, where he began to learn the craft of fine art street photography.

Stephen DiRado, Bell Pond: Mary Lou (Left) and Family, July 2, 1983, silver gelatin print, printed 2017, 9″ x 12″ Frame 19″ x 16.” Courtesy of the Artist.

DiRado creates most of his photographs with analog 4” x 5” or 8” x 10” view cameras, which allow unparalleled control of resolution, detail, tone, depth of field, and composition. The sophistication of these tools is matched by their inconvenience – the cameras, and the accompanying gear, are heavy, cumbersome, and expensive, and require physical stamina and a strong work ethic. For his recent and on-going series, Across the Table recent projects, DiRado uses a tiny hand-held digital camera.

Ultimately, for DiRado, photography is a means to forge empathetic relationships with people, create community, and express love.

Stephen DiRado, Martha’s Vineyard Beach People: Abigail, Aquinnah, MA, July 13, 2014, Silver Gelatin Print, printed 2014, 8″ x 10,” Frame 19″ x 16.” Courtesy of the Artist.

Stephen DiRado, Better Together: Four Decades of Photographs includes seventy-five black-and-white photographs, 1,001 projected color images, and three videos about the artist, his life, and his work process.

This exhibition has been organized by FAM Director Nick Capasso, and has been funded in part by the Simonds Lecture Fund, the Clementi Family Acquisition Fund, and a generous grant from the Amelia V. Gallucci-Cirio Endowment Fund at the Fitchburg State University Foundation.