‘I found purpose as an artist’
Stephen DiRado has been a fixture at Clark — and in Worcester — for nearly 45 years. He started teaching photography at the University in 1982, and a year later made a decision that would ultimately shape his career.
Immediately after earning a BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art in 1981, he focused on documenting people in the community. The resulting photographs were “technically adequate,” he says, but also disjointed. He began searching for a community where he could connect with people, earn their trust, and produce a unified body of work.
He found it at Bell Pond, an inner-city beach and park at the top of Worcester’s Belmont Hill. He wanted community, and this had it all: families, elders, and teenagers, massed together on the beach and in the water. He joined them nearly every day from May to September.
A fraction of the thousand photos he captured (some of which are shown below) were exhibited in 1984 at the Grove Street Gallery in Worcester and, 42 years later, now hang on the walls of the Kapow Gallery in New York City. The exhibit, titled simply “Bell Pond,” opens with a reception Thursday, Sept. 10, and will be on view through Oct. 3. The exhibit coincides with the release of a book of the same name.
In an essay in the book, DiRado describes how he connected with the community, earned its acceptance, and became known as “the picture man.”
He also developed as a professional photographer. “My obsession with thinking and working as a practitioner came to fruition. What I had accomplished was not a formulaic stamped-out essay, but a standard for all the projects that would follow in my career,” he writes. “I was determined to make photographs that were well-versed narratives, and that captured the soul of a collective — people who are drawn to a location that they identify as home. Bell Pond became the micro-environment where I found purpose as an artist.”
Kourosh Mahboubian ’87 is the founder and owner of the Kapow Gallery and had a personal reason for hosting DiRado’s exhibit. “Stephen was largely responsible for my decision to enter the art world and has been my friend and mentor for over forty years,” he says. “I was one of five students in his first class at Clark, and I became a gallerist in part because of him.”
Mahboubian, whose son, Dylan, is a Clark sophomore, notes that the Bell Pond collection marks a defining moment in DiRado’s work. “Stephen magically captured his subjects’ souls, drawing out their most open, honest, and vulnerable expressions, building community and relationships through photographs. I’ve waited nearly four decades to do this show.”
Here are just a few of the photos Stephen DiRado took during his summer at Bell Pond.
