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, creating and 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 images of the night sky, connecting celestial events with human culture.

Stephen DiRado, Better Together: Four Decades of Photographs includes seventy-five black-and white photographs, over 1,000 projected color images, and three videos about the artist and his work process.

This exhibition 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.