Vito Grippi is a photographer, filmmaker, poet, and musician. He cofounded the literary journals, Shaking like a Mountain, and v cv magazine, teaches photography workshops, and is an instructor of creative writing at York College of Pennsylvania. He served as Poet Laureate of York from 2017-2020.
Vito has spent much of his creative life searching for the intersection of where his multifaceted artistic approach, and his desire to fully communicate and express his emotions, finally become ... view more »
Vito Grippi is a photographer, filmmaker, poet, and musician. He cofounded the literary journals, Shaking like a Mountain, and v cv magazine, teaches photography workshops, and is an instructor of creative writing at York College of Pennsylvania. He served as Poet Laureate of York from 2017-2020.
Vito has spent much of his creative life searching for the intersection of where his multifaceted artistic approach, and his desire to fully communicate and express his emotions, finally become one. In many ways, his years of musical performance and his advanced education and exploration of creative writing are what have lead him to photography.
His photography work blends documentary with the surreal to reach for the kind of truth only found when we are able to see past what is before us. The act of creation becomes an act of discovery and excavation. In that way, the photographic lens becomes a tool to not simply capture our surroundings, but to see the poetry that dances just under the surface and beyond the borders of each frame.
His most current body of photographs, titled THIS IS DUST AND THIS AND THIS, has been part of multiple solo exhibitions and explores a common thread that bonds us in the human experience; we all return to dust. The project is an act of seeing, of reflecting, of accepting—an act of solidarity and a celebration with the absurd, mysterious, and whimsical moments happening around us. The photographs in this collection are a poem about you and me, about our ability to hold one another, about knowing that life is just one fleeting moment in a perpetual carousel.
Additionally Vito continues to explore the ways in which visual, musical, and literary arts converge through the creation of short films/video, photo essays, and interactive or multi-sensory experiences. Most recently, he has begun the process of bringing a community dark room to the city of York to give film photographers and artists the ability to develop and print their own work and provide education and resources surrounding the craft of making photographs.
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