Jed Devine American, 1944 - John Edward "Jed" Devine (born in Mount Kisco, New York) has worked as both an artist and educator. He studied painting at Yale University (B.A., 1967; M.F.A., 1972) and during that time began to photograph, finding the nature of abstract painting too "impersonal" for his concerns. He studied with and printed for Walker Evans and, like his professor, has worked primarily with an 8 x 10-inch camera. As subjects he chooses people and objects with personal associations, printing in black and white using the platinum-palladium process, which he feels best expresses the sensual qualities of his images. Committed to both the expressive and formal properties of the photographic process, Devine has stated that he is "more interested in the feeling of a picture than in any idea behind it." In a series of images exhibited and published under the title Friendship (1994), Devine explored his relationship with Jim Dinsmore -- a native of Friendship, Maine -- who died in 1988. Devine conceived of the project as an examination of the continual cycle of life, death, and renewal, juxtaposing images of simple everyday objects with landscape scenes, portraits of Dinsmore, and their letters of correspondence spanning the 13 years before Dinsmore's death. He has since focused on the memento mori as a subject, using as symbols melons and skulls to ruminate on the dichotomies of fecundity and decay, life and death. In addition to Friendship, Devine has published a monograph titled The Bethesda Terrace (1987). Among his many awards and honors are the Bishop Paul Moore Fellowship in Painting (1968), the Alice Kimball English Traveling Fellowship (1972), a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts (1986), and a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1987). Since 1977 Devine has taught photography at the State University of New York College at Purchase. He lives in New York. A.W.