How do you begin to engage with an exhibition of someone whose work you’ve followed for nearly 40 years, a period during which he documented many of your friends and, over time, as a reporter, had the honor of working with? In “Stephen DiRado, Better Together: Four Decades of Photographs,” on view through June 1 at the Fitchburg Art Museum (FAM), everyone seems to have been a friend of the Worcester-based photographer and Clark University professor. It’s one of those rare exhibitions that on any day, you’ll probably find one of the people captured on the walls standing next to you.
Many of DiRado’s students were on hand for the show’s opening reception on February 8, searching for themselves in “The Classroom Series” that DiRado started in 2008 and continues today, documenting each new group of students; they weren’t alone. “So many people came to see it from my past, fans from afar flying and driving in to shake my hand,” DiRado recalled. “Like a proud parent, you were all my children, coming off the walls in the real world to be part of a massive reunion.”
DiRado has immersed himself into the lives and settings of the people that he’s photographed for an extended period of time, whether they be mall rats or mall shoppers, sun bathers or students, friends or strangers soon to be friends, only leaving when he feels that he’s taken every shot that needs to be taken.
“One of the great things about Stephen’s work is that it already appeals to people,” said Fitchburg Art Museum Director Nick Capasso. “These are photographs about individuals, lovers, friends, communities, family and their relationships to each other and two places: Worcester and Martha’s Vineyard. The photos are also overtly beautiful, and approachable, but never sentimental. Visitors feel it; visitors get it. And these images are valued even more deeply during this terrible time in American history, marked by politics that are distinctly cruel and inhuman. Everybody could use a little Stephen DiRado right about now.”