Our meeting will start an hour early, at 6:30 p.m., with our Winter Social.
Frank Van Riper is an internationally acclaimed documentary and fine art photographer, journalist, and author.
Van Riper’s latest book, published in the fall of 2018, is Recovered Memory: New York & Paris 1960-1980 (Daylight Books). It is tonight’s subject, and will be available for purchase at the meeting. You can read the book announcement here: Recovered_Memory.pdf
Frank’s work is in the permanent collections of the National Portrait Gallery, the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine, the photography archive of the University of Maryland Baltimore County, and the Tides Institute collection, Eastport Maine, among others. A portfolio of photographs from his award-winning book Down East Maine / A World Apart is promised to the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
For nineteen years, Van Riper was a photography columnist of the Washington Post. His column, Talking Photography, is now available online at www.TalkingPhotography.com
Before leaving daily journalism for photography in 1987, Van Riper was the White House correspondent, national political correspondent, and Washington Bureau news editor of the New York Daily News. He is a native New Yorker and 1967 graduate of the City College of New York, as well as a 1979 Nieman Fellow at Harvard. In 2011 he was inducted into the CCNY Communications Alumni Hall of Fame. Four years earlier, he received the Distinguished Achievement Award from the University of Maine at Machias for his long career in journalism and photography.
Frank was born in Manhattan and grew up in the Bronx. He attended public schools in New York City and joined the New York Daily News one week after his graduation from CCNY. During his 20-year career with the Daily News he covered the anti-Vietnam war movement, the urban rioting following the 1968 assassinations of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Watergate scandal, and every presidential campaign from 1968 through 1984.
In 1980 he was awarded (along with his colleague, the late Lars-Erik Nelson) the Merriman Smith Memorial Award from the White House Correspondents Association for their deadline coverage of the negotiations that finally freed the US hostages held captive at the American embassy in Tehran following the rise of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
In 1983 Van Riper wrote his first book, the nationally acclaimed biography of Sen. John H. Glenn, Jr., Glenn: the Astronaut Who Would be President. His other books include Faces of the Eastern Shore, 1992 (foreword by James A. Michener), Down East Maine / A World Apart, 1998 (nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and recipient of the silver award for photography from the Art Directors Club of Metropolitan Washington), Talking Photography, 2002 (A ten-year collection of his Washington Post columns and other photography essays) and Serenissima: Venice in Winter, 2008 (done in collaboration with his wife and partner, photographer and sculptor Judith Goodman.)
Singly and together, Van Riper and Goodman also lead photography workshops in Washington, D.C., Maine and Italy. They live in Washington, D.C. and Lubec, Maine.