The Green Heart of Italy: Umbria and its Ancient Neighbors

Photographs by Judith Goodman and Frank Van Riper
Text by Frank Van Riper

The Writer’s Center of Bethesda is proud to welcome Chevy Chase, DC husband and wife photographer/authors Frank Van Riper and Judith Goodman to a reception, exhibition and book-signing to celebrate publication of their latest international bestseller, featuring Umbria—the little-known area in the center of Italy that often is called “Tuscany without the tourists.”

Ten years in the making, the The Green Heart of Italy twins glorious documentary and fine art photography with lyrical prose. It follows their previous award-winning book, Serenissima: Venice in Winter.

Much more than a tourist guide, this book takes you into homes, palazzi and artist’s studios to give readers a taste of daily life that complements Umbria’s stunning vistas and architecture.

During his remarks, Frank Van Riper—also a nationally acclaimed journalist and author, will discuss “the exponential magic of networking,” and how he used his own practice of personal, longform writing to bring Umbria alive.

Frank Van Riper and Judith Goodman are husband and wife documentary and fine art photographers, whose work has been published internationally. Goodman’s photography has hung in the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC and the Baltimore Museum; she also is an award-winning assemblage sculptor and a member of the Washington Sculptors’ Group. Van Riper’s photography is in the permanent collections of the National Portrait Gallery (Washington, DC) as well as the Portland Gallery of Art (Portland, ME.) His 1998 book of photography and essays, Down East Maine/A World Apart, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and won the silver award for photography from the Art Director’s Club of Metropolitan Washington. His current book is Recovered Memory: New York & Paris 1960-1980.

Goodman and Van Riper are the co-authors of Serenissima: Venice in Winter, an internationally bestselling coffee table book of black and white photographs and essays that was published in the United States and in Italy.

Frank Van Riper also is a widely read online photography columnist  (www.TalkingPhotography.com) and for nineteen years was the photography columnist of the Washington Post. Before that he served as White House correspondent, national political correspondent and Washington Bureau news editor of the New York Daily News. He was a 1979 Nieman Fellow at Harvard and holds the 1980 Merriman Smith Award (with the late Lars-Erik Nelson) from the White House Correspondents Association.

Van Riper is a popular teacher and lecturer, and is on the faculty of PhotoWorks at Glen Echo Park, Md. He has lectured widely, including at the Maine Photographic Workshops and the Smithsonian Resident Associate program. In 2007 he was awarded the Distinguished Achievement Award from the University of Maine at Machias for his “outstanding career in journalism and photography” and in 2011 was inducted into the City College of New York Communications Alumni Hall of Fame.

Goodman and Van Riper jointly taught photography workshops in the US and in Italy: The Lubec Photo Workshops at SummerKeys (Lubec, ME) and, in Italy, the Umbria Photo Workshops, as well as Unseen Serenissima: The Venice in Winter Photo Workshops (www.GVRphoto.com).

They live in Washington, DC.

Photo Credit: © Fritz Gibbon