Photographing the Life That Rockwell Depicted

"Which One?" by Norman Rockwell. The cover illustration for the Saturday Evening Post, Nov. 4, 1944.

With his allegiance to dewy-eyed innocence and earnest sentimentality, the illustrator Norman Rockwell has often been mocked for creating an America that never was and never will be. But Kevin Rivoli, a photojournalist in upstate New York, will tell you that’s just not true. He knows because he’s documented it.

"Election Day," by Kevin Rivoli. The voting booth picture (dated Nov. 1995) was taken at the Sennett Fire Department in Sennett, N.Y.

Mr. Rivoli has spent the past 15 years capturing timeless moments in contemporary America — the solemn christenings and squirmy first haircuts, the town meetings and patriotic parades, the youthful shenanigans and the mature reverence symbolized by elderly hands resting on a well-thumbed bible.

"Wedding Day," by Kevin Rivoli

The project has received the blessing of the Rockwell family; the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass.; and Curtis Publishing, owners of The Saturday Evening Post, whose covers Rockwell illustrations adorned. Additionally, some scholars hope that Mr. Rivoli’s images will put the old criticism about Rockwell to rest once and for all.

"Can't Wait," by Norman Rockwell. An illustration published in a 1972 calender produced for the Boy Scouts of America.

“I cover a lot of small-town America,” said Mr. Rivoli, 47, a contract photographer with The Associated Press who occasionally does work for The New York Times. “I’m not a war photographer, I’m not in metropolitan America. I tend to look for connections between people."

“Rockwell did a lot of that in his artwork,” he said.

"Off To War," Fort Drum, N.Y., Saturday, Feb. 7, 2004.

Mr. Rivoli connected with Rockwell 18 years ago when he and his future wife, Michele, visited the Rockwell museum. There they learned of critics’ contentions that Mr. Rockwell’s images were trite and kitschy figments of their creator’s nostalgic imagination. "Kevin immediately said, ‘He’s not creating an America that doesn’t exist,’" Ms. Rivoli, a former reporter, recalled. "‘Those moments do exist, and I have them on film."

With his allegiance to dewy-eyed innocence and earnest sentimentality, the illustrator Norman Rockwell has often been mocked for creating an America that never was and never will be.

But Kevin Rivoli, a photojournalist in upstate New York, will tell you that’s just not true. He knows because he’s documented it.

Mr. Rivoli has spent the past 15 years capturing timeless moments in contemporary America — the solemn christenings and squirmy first haircuts, the town meetings and patriotic parades, the youthful shenanigans and the mature reverence symbolized by elderly hands resting on a well-thumbed bible.

He calls his project “In Search of Norman Rockwell’s America,” and by autumn his photographs will have grown into a book, published by Prestel, and a traveling exhibition, overseen by International Arts and Artists, that juxtaposes Mr. Rivoli’s images with Rockwell’s.

The project has received the blessing of the Rockwell family; the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass.; and Curtis Publishing, owners of The Saturday Evening Post, whose covers Rockwell illustrations adorned. Additionally, some scholars hope that Mr. Rivoli’s images will put the old criticism about Rockwell to rest once and for all.

“I cover a lot of small-town America,” said Mr. Rivoli, 47, a contract photographer with The Associated Press who occasionally does work for The New York Times. “I’m not a war photographer, I’m not in metropolitan America. I tend to look for connections between people.

“Rockwell did a lot of that in his artwork,” he said.

Mr. Rivoli connected with Rockwell 18 years ago when he and his future wife, Michele, visited the Rockwell Museum. There they learned of critics’ contentions that Rockwell’s images were trite and kitschy figments of their creator’s nostalgic imagination.

“Kevin immediately said, ‘He’s not creating an America that doesn’t exist,’” Ms. Rivoli, a former reporter, recalled. “‘Those moments do exist, and I have them on film.’”

Over time Mr. Rivoli collected more than 120 such images, mostly the result of spontaneous moments snapped during assignments in upstate New York. For example, a photo of altar boys at a 1996 wedding in Otisco recalls the “Choirboy” cover Rockwell drew for the Post in 1954.

“When I go into an assignment that could be boring, I try to look for the picture within the picture, the essence of Norman Rockwell,” he said. “I always think, ‘How would he paint this?’”

For a while the Rivolis owned a gallery near their home outside Auburn, in the Finger Lakes region. But they closed shop two and a half years ago to spend more time with their small twin sons.

“My concern was that Kevin wasn’t going to have a creative outlet for people to enjoy what he did,” Ms. Rivoli said. So she suggested that he compile his images into a book.

“One day we started looking at Rockwell’s artwork, and it was kind of uncanny, in that the pictures would match up,” Mr. Rivoli said. “There were a lot of parallels between what I was shooting over the years and what he painted.”

The Rivolis sent the images to the Rockwell Museum and to John Rockwell, Norman’s grandson, who granted the Rivolis the rights to use the artist’s art and name.

“I thought it looked great, and I thought it was nice that he was inspired by Norman’s pictures,” John Rockwell said. “I think the moments in Norman’s pictures, if they actually didn’t take place, they could have taken place. I think Kevin’s pictures do show that there’s a side of America that still exists.”

Mr. Rivoli’s images may help buttress the argument that Rockwell’s illustrations helped to give rise to feature photojournalism in the 1950s and ’60s.

“Rockwell really taught photographers to see those common everyday moments, which he defined through his covers for The Saturday Evening Post,” said Andrew L. Mendelson, chairman of the journalism department at Temple University.

“The era of illustrators is really over, and in my argument that era has been replaced by photojournalism,” said Mr. Mendelson, who has written about Rockwell’s impact for publications like Journalism History.

Rockwell began selling his illustrations in the 1910s, before the advent of hand-held cameras in the ’20s made it easier for photographers to capture their subjects in motion rather than have them pose before a tripod.

He also chose average men, women and children as his subjects at a time when illustration veered toward celebrity portraits or fantasy scenes.

That trend also emerged in Depression-era photography commissioned by the United States government in the 1930s, though not with “the juxtaposition of humorous elements of everyday life,” Mr. Mendelson said, a Rockwell twist that sometimes drew derision from art photographers and photojournalists, who found his images banal and contrived.

“Photographers like to say that they’re finding real moments,” Mr. Mendelson said. “They want to think that they’re finding something new.”

“But when I look at award-winning photographs within journalism, almost every photograph that wins is a Rockwell moment,” he said. “He has taught us how to see what is really important to us.”

News isn’t always about the bad things, Mr. Mendelson noted. Sometimes it’s about events that make people happy.

Perhaps it’s just that most of the time people aren’t paying attention, Mr. Rivoli said.

“There are these subtle, quiet traditions that we don’t care about or pay attention to because maybe we’re too busy to notice or are inundated with the politics of daily life,” he said. “But as a photojournalist we chronicle our lives, our communities, our families.

“Rockwell did the same thing.”

December 26, 2007