image credit: Frank DiPerna
Thursday October 1 * 7pm * REGISTER
Very Even. Not a lot of Shadows: A Conversation about Frank DiPerna's work with Jayme McLellan & Ferd Protzman
This event is co-partnered with our friends at REVOLVE AVL & SIX FEET
"That’s the light that energizes me to photograph. If that light isn’t there, I don’t bother." - Frank DiPerna
Frank DiPerna's work spans several decades and moves through a remarkable breadth of visual explorations. Join us as curator Jayme McLellan and critic Ferd Protzman discuss Frank's work and its influence on generations of photographers in the Washington DC region.
Reviewing an exhibition at the Kathleen Ewing Gallery in 2000, Ferdinand Protzman wrote in The Washington Post that Mr. DiPerna’s landscapes from Nova Scotia, Minnesota and North Dakota were “some of the most profoundly beautiful photographs of his career.”
Of one particular photograph, “The Cut, Southampton, New York,” Protzman remarked, “It is a masterpiece, the quintessence of DiPerna’s uniquely American style of landscape photography. The bursts of spray are frozen in space, forming a line of snowy lace that could have been created by a few quick dabs of a painter’s brush.”
ABOUT FRANK DIPERNA
Frank DiPerna was fresh out of college working as an engineer in the 197Os when his Vietnam draft number was close to being called. With firm views about not going to war
and by a fortuitous twist of circumstance, the draft was suspended and he was spared. Such were the times then; a nation about to unseat a president over an unjust war; young people tuning in, desiring freedom, and seeking exploration. At the beginning of DiPerna’s photographic career, after teaching himself the craft in his kitchen, he headed out to explore the country, free from the ties that bind experiencing a new found freedom that was pervasive. His journey led him to Aspen where he met Nathan Lyons at a campground, by chance. It was the same as with his photography, DiPerna somehow knew the place to be. (McLellan essay, 2018)
He taught photography at what is now the Corcoran School of the Arts & Design, beginning in 1974, and two years later he launched its bachelor of fine arts program in photography. When the Corcoran School merged with George Washington University in 2014, he remained on the faculty until his health began to fail last year.
Frank, who lived in Purcellville, Va., was 73 when he died June 26 at a hospital in Falls Church, Va. (Estrada, obituary, 2020)
ABOUT JAYME MCLELLAN
Jayme is a curator, educator, artist, and writer. For over twenty years she has curated the work of artists in galleries, museums, and arts organizations in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. She founded the Washington, D.C. based gallery Civilian Art Projects in 2006, and co-founded Transformer in 2002. Prior to this she worked at DC Arts Center. She curated Frank DiPerna Retrospective at the American University Museum in 2018. She is adjunct lecturer at Georgetown University and is in the final year of her master’s degree course work at Harvard University Extension School. She lives close to the ocean and visits the horses at Assateague Island National Park as often as possible.
ABOUT FERD PROTZMAN
Ferdinand is an author, cultural critic and award-winning journalist who has worked for national and international newspapers, magazines and publishers including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the International Herald Tribune, ARTnews, and National Geographic Books.