Softcover with dust jacket
126 pages, 65 plates
9 x 11 in / 228.6 x 279.4 mm
ISBN 978-1-942953-83-8
TBW Books is pleased to announce the publication of Bell Pond, a new monograph by artist Stephen DiRado.
Bell Pond documents the summer of 1983 at a public swimming pond in Worcester, Massachusetts, where DiRado spent months photographing the community that gathered there. Arriving one afternoon on a whim during an early heat wave, he introduced himself to anyone willing to pay attention—and kept coming back. Working with a large-format camera on a tripod, he distributed prints, and slowly became part of the community's fabric, earning the trust of those who might otherwise have had little reason to give it. That trust was hard won and freely returned—by summer's end, DiRado had become a fixture, his daily arrival an event in itself.
The resulting portraits are unparalleled in their intimacy—and together they build a vivid portrait of the place and its inhabitants. DiRado moved between families, friends, couples, and individuals—capturing the textures of a working-class community that claimed Bell Pond as its own. The work is a timestamp of a world before the internet and the endless digital reproduction of likenesses. Through DiRado's lens, these lives are given weight and permanence—crystallized on film in a way the world around them rarely afforded. Whole stories exist within each frame, and the mystery of what we'll never fully know pushes to the foreground. DiRado stayed close to many of his subjects long after that summer ended, invested in them as people, not just as photographs.
What runs through every image is DiRado's deep humanism. These are people society too often passes over, and here they are seen clearly, without sentimentality, and without looking away.