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Peter de Lory’s The Wild and the Innocent was commissioned by the California Museum of Photography as part of the museum’s continuing study of the book form. It is, in every sense, a contemporary artist’s book: its content and layout controlled by de Lory alone, its iconography right out of a modern-day barroom-window neon-sign symbology. But the work does not advance our notions of “book” and “photograph” so much as it harks back to the narrative origins of these media. The Wild and the Innocent is a story, and de Lory is a witty, poignant storyteller. Such a straightforward approach to meaning in art never fails to charm.

Peter de Lory was born October 2,1948, in Orleans, Massachusetts. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1971 and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Colorado in 1974. He has been an instructor at art schools and universities across the country; he now lives in San Francisco, where he teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute and at San Jose State University.

De Lory has had over forty one-person and group exhibitions since 1974, including individual shows at the Boise Gallery of Art, Carl Siembab Gallery, Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies, Sheldon Museum of Art, and major university museums. His work is in the collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art, Fogg Museum, Minneapolis Museum of Art, Seattle Art Museum, Visual Studies Workshop, Worcester Museum of Art, and numerous other institutions and corporations.

In 1978 de Lory received a National Endowment for the Arts Photographer’s Fellowship, and in 1976 he was awarded the Western States Art Foundation Fellowship. His work has been widely published and reviewed in such periodicals as Aperture, Creative Camera, Afterimage, and Picture. This is his first book.