Together with recently found Kent memorabilia shown at the Kent Memorial Library during April and May, there will be photos on display, mostly from Kent, taken by Dorli Di Gregorio.

Ms. Di Gregorio will always be found, camera in hand, looking for that moment in time, whether it be of a landscape or of people to make that moment permanent in the form of a photograph. The beauty of Kent and its surroundings is something she dearly loves and gives her many opportunities to do just that.

She related having always had a love for photography, remembering as a young girl in Brooklyn, developing black and white film in a closet of an apartment she shared with her family. They had immigrated to the United States from Germany in 1939 having barely escaped the Nazi terror. Her father was Jewish.

Photography gave her a certain satisfaction but she didn’t realize why till she began to study the philosophy of Eli Siegel, poet, philosopher and founder of the not-for-profit educational foundation, Aesthetic Realism located in New York City. She began her study in l985 and it profoundly changed her life and her attitude to the world.

Eli Siegel said:

"There are two means of bringing some satisfaction to ourselves. The first is the seeing of something like a sunset, a poem, a concerto, which can stand for the world and which pleases us through what it is: Its structure in mind, time and space. This is the aesthetic victory, which is the most sensible of all victories. The other victory is our ability to depreciate anything that exists. To see the world itself as an impossible mess – and this is often not difficult at all and gives a certain triumph to the individual." He called this contempt and man’s greatest danger, "to be for himself by making less of the outside world."

He also stated:

"All beauty is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves."

Ms. Di Gregorio said: "The photos in this exhibit put those opposites together such as light and shade, softness and sharpness, foreground and background. The largest opposites are self and world and I feel as I want to have my mind join with the world through a photograph, these two opposites are one. That gives me a tremendous sense of pleasure and composure and has me see the whole world with more accuracy including a husband, friends, objects or anything I may meet each day."

Dorli Di Gregorio also paints in watercolor and uses many of her photos as subjects. She also enjoys setting up still lives for the Monday Morning Art Group that meet during the winter at Templeton Farms and during the warm months, at her studio on Fuller Mountain Road. Flower, vegetable gardening and cooking are among her other strong interests. Together with her husband, Francois Di Gregorio, they harvest wonderful produce that enables their meals to be especially pleasurable.

She met Mr. Di Gregorio at the age of 16, when he came to give her mother French lessons after she called the N.Y.U. employment office for a tutor. The family was planning their first trip back to Europe after the war.

This is the fiftieth year of their marriage. They feel very fortunate to be living in the beautiful town of Kent and to find the world that surrounds them fresh and new every day. Ms. Di Gregorio is grateful to have been given a second chance to meet that world with grace through her studies at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation.

Kent Station