Peter de LoryPhotographer

About

Romantic structuralist · Born 1948 · Fifty years of work

“I photograph in a very formal, straightforward way structurally, which frees the subject up for interpretation, creating an opening for emotion and meaning.”

Peter de Lory was born in 1948 in Orleans, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. He began photographing in 1964, before leaving for college — work that became The Cape and Back Pages. He took a BFA at the San Francisco Art Institute from 1967 to 1971 — a classmate of Annie Leibovitz — and an MFA at the University of Colorado from 1972 to 1974.

While still a student he worked summers at the Center of the Eye in Aspen — the photography school Cherie Hiser founded in 1968, later folded into Anderson Ranch Arts Center — in the darkroom alongside Paul Caponigro, and in the orbit of Minor White, Jerry Uelsmann, Garry Winogrand, and Bruce Davidson. In 1973, Aperture opened Volume 17, Number 2 with his photograph — a frontispiece chosen by Minor White himself.

The romantic structuralist

Peter de Lory coined the term for his own practice. The structure of each photograph is formal and straightforward; the subject is left open. He was influenced by Edward Weston but sought work that was “more spiritual” and “a little bit mystical rather than just exactly true,” and drew on the documentary clarity of Walker Evans and Robert Frank. His reading of the West — Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, Cormac McCarthy — runs through the work. It is about, in his words, the ways memory and myth overlay reality.

He moved to the Pacific Northwest in 1994 and is based in Seattle. He is married to the artist Kay Kirkpatrick, with whom he made the Wenatchee mural Confluence (2000).

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