Date: Fri 09-Oct-1998

Publication: Ant

Author: LIZAM

Quick Words:

Rappaport

Full Text:

Photographer Rappaport Dies Of Cancer At 56

WEST PAWLET, VT. (AP) -- Renowned photographer Neil Rappaport, whose work has

been displayed at museums across the country and who taught at Bennington

College for 25 years, has died of cancer. He was 56.

An exhibit of Rappaport's work was one of the best attended ever at the San

Francisco Museum of Modern Art. His work also had been displayed at the Museum

of Fine Arts in Boston.

But residents around Pawlet may admire him most. For three decades Rappaport

and his wife, Suzanne, had called West Pawlet home, and he documented the

lives of his neighbors, often giving farmers, quarry workers and welfare

families prints so their descendants could enjoy them "100 years hence."

"They're biographies rather than essays," he once said of his series of

portrayals, such as the Pawlet Visual Census, his farm pictures and

documentation of the slate industry.

Rappaport was fond of quoting the American poet William Carlos Williams: "The

only thing that is universal is the local."

Suzanne Rappaport, now on leave from her post as executive director of the

Slate Valley Museum in Granville, N.Y., said she would now catalogue the many

negatives and prints that Neil was always too busy to organize. "It will be

one of my greatest jobs, and I take that job willingly," she said.

She said there would not be a funeral service, but she expects to invite

people to a memorial picnic in the spring.