All about me (hey look, here's an Easter Egg 📷✈️🚅🚗⛴🚲🚇🏔🏝🏜 🏙🏯🗺🌅🌄📷)
Born and raised in NYC, Robert A. Ripps has been taking pictures for longer than he would care to admit.
He finds the unexpected in the commonplace, creating humanistic images that capture a personal moment in time. A theme that runs throughout his work is an examination of how human civilization and nature interact.
His latest personal project, Negativityness, is a response to the political climate in our country right now- everything seems to be about negativity, about division, about what is truth (and what is inarguably false, yet touted as truth). It is about how the surface of things can be 180 degrees opposite from what is underneath, it is about falsehoods and unseen influence. It is about discordance, about disorientation, about a world turned upside down and inside out.
Robert's first monograph Urban Trees was published in November 2014, in which he tries to answer the question, how does a tree grow in Brooklyn, or in other cities, where people and concrete are constantly encroaching?
In 2009, his first book She's Out There! The Next Generation of Presidential Candidates was published, featuring portraits of 35 young future female leaders of America, taken in distinct locations throughout the United States. The book examined the lives, visions and political ambitions of a diverse cross section of 35 American women between the ages of 5 and 35, through personal essays and environmental portraits of the subjects.
Robert has won awards from both the PDN Photo/Design Awards, and the PDN/Nikon Self Promotion Awards, he has also received a film grant from the Polaroid Corporation, and recently his work has been selected to appear in the American Photography 36 annual award book.
He has exhibited his work nationally, and his most recent show was a solo installation entitled Negativityness Reconsidered, in which he displayed three large-scale photographic images from his Negativityness series in a curated organic environment, in a street level window gallery in Tribeca, in New York City.
A longtime member of ASMP (American Society of Media Photographers), he has served on the Board of the NY Chapter. Robert is also a long standing member of APA (American Photographic Artists), where he was on the NY board for many years, before serving as a National Vice President for four years.
When not traveling around the globe for business and pleasure, or seeking out new and exotic pork dishes, he resides downtown, occasionally with his sons, Max and Oliver, who are now old enough to be totally embarrassed by any mention of them. Robert has so far managed to avoid adopting any pets or visiting Disneyland.