Frank will discuss photographing in a foreign country and include images made by him and his wife in Umbria, Venice, Paris, England, and Japan. Among other things, Frank will discuss how he gets people to let him photograph their daily lives and activities, the best times to shoot on the street, why the most popular tourist attractions often are the worst venues for great photography—and  how to loosen someone up even when you don’t speak the language.

Bio:

Frank Van Riper is an award-winning documentary and fine art photographer, journalist, author and lecturer whose work has been published internationally. 

His photographs are in the permanent collections of the National Portrait Gallery (Washington, DC) as well as in the Portland Museum of Art (Portland, Maine.) His 1998 book of photography and essays, Down East Maine/A World Apart, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and won the silver award for photography from the Art Director’s Club of Metropolitan Washington. 

His latest book is Recovered Memory: New York & Paris 1960-1980, which immediately became an Amazon bestseller. His previous book, done in collaboration with his wife and professional partner Judith Goodman, was Serenissima: Venice in Winter, a coffee table collection of black and white photographs and essays, published in 2008 both in the US and Italy.  Their next collaboration—and their first book in color–is The Green Heart of Italy: Umbria and its Ancient Neighbors. (Fall, 2025)

Van Riper was a member of the New York Daily News Washington Bureau for 20 years, serving as White House correspondent, national political correspondent and Washington Bureau news editor. He was a 1979 Nieman Fellow at Harvard. In 1982 he partnered with his wife in commercial and documentary photography. In 1992, Van Riper became photography columnist of the Washington Post, where his column, “Talking Photography,” appeared for 19 years. It now is now available at www.TalkingPhotography.com. 

A popular teacher and lecturer, Van Riper is on the faculty of PhotoWorks at Glen Echo Park, Md., and has lectured and/or taught in the Smithsonian Resident Associate Program, the Maine Photographic Workshops, the University of Maine at Machias and at other colleges and universities in the mid-Atlantic.