Girl with Lingerie Catalogue, 1988

Paul D’Amato (1956- ) was born in Boston where he attended Boston Latin School at the height of racial unrest, civil rights, and bussing. He moved to Oregon to attend Reed College and claims to have learned as much from traveling cross-country four times a year -often by hitch-hiking and hopping freight- as he did in class. After receiving an MFA from Yale he moved to Chicago where he discovered the communities of Pilsen and Little Village. The pictures and writing D’Amato produced there over the next fourteen years -despite having had to move to Maine to teach- eventually became the book, Barrio (University of Chicago Press, 2006). D’Amato moved back to Chicago in 2001 to teach at Columbia College and is currently photographing in the black community on the near west side of the city. He has been awarded numerous grants and fellowships including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Grant, and a Rockefeller Foundation Grant to Bellagio, Italy. In 2013 D’Amato had a showing of works from his ongoing series, “We Shall” at the DePaul University Art Museum in Chicago, accompanied by a catalogue of the same title. (Bio sourced from Stephen Daiter Gallery)