Jed Devine was born in Mount Kisco, NY in 1944, and received an MFA from Yale in 1972. Originally trained as a painter, Devine began taking photographs in 1972 and became fascinated by the effects of light on objects and surfaces, and the sensuality that was possible with the platinum-palladium process.
This sensuality is on full display in Devine’s only book, Friendship, a collaboration with the writer Jim Dinsmore, whose sixty-four images “form an extended sequence that moves from innocence to decay and return. The images emphasize the beauty and primacy of light while capturing the visual drama and irony of the Maine landscape.”
Devine also has a long-standing relationship with New York City, which is most evident in his portfolio of panoramic photographs celebrating New York bridges, which, though printed on a small scale, still capture the grandeur of the monumental structures spanning the Hudson and East Rivers. These historic images exist in dialogue with The Bethesda Terrace, which showcases the well-frequented romantic spot in the middle of Central Park. Devine was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship for The Bethesda Terrace in 1985.
When Devine developed problems with his balance as a result of inner-ear issues, he switched to smaller cameras and ultimately to digital. The artist describes this forced change of format as a “disguised blessing”: “Everything was new again. More spontaneous, more flexible, more surprising.” His most recent exhibition featured layers of imagery—art books and postcards, batteries, rubber bands, dice, and hard-boiled eggs on breakfast tables—that provide a diary of domestic activities as well as a library of the images that have defined the artist’s sensibility. The resulting eclectic collages veer gently into the realm of abstraction; at once concrete and elusive, they are, in the artist’s words, “wildly gregarious, and when they get together they often surprise with unexpected connections.”
Devine’s photographs are in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco; The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago; and The Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
