Photographer inspired by Rockwell images

"IN SEARCH OF NORMAN ROCKWELL'S AMERICA" by Kevin Rivoli, Howard Books, 128 pages, $24.99

Photographer Kevin Rivoli has an eye for the ordinary.

It's a topic most would see as boring, but not Rivoli. It's the ordinary, simple things in life that mean the most, he says. And it's the jumping-off point for his latest project, "In Search of Norman Rockwell's America."

As a freelance photojournalist for The Associated Press and New York Times, Rivoli does "all the stuff that every newspaper does," he said. "And not all of that stuff is happy news and not always the best news of our day."

Like Rockwell, Rivoli has chosen to focus on the more positive aspects of America, the universal moments people celebrate — birthdays, first dates, holidays, kids in funny predicaments.

"In Search of Norman Rockwell's America" pairs Rivoli's spontaneous photographs side by side with Rockwell's famous paintings in book form, which hits bookstores on Tuesday, and in the form of an exhibition that will travel the United States for two years beginning in summer 2009.

"The whole premise of the book is to have spontaneous moments that prove that Rockwell's America is alive and well today," Rivoli said in a phone interview from New York. "The pictures could be anywhere USA. We decided to keep them as generic as Rockwell's so that the images connected to the Rockwell artwork."

Rivoli started developing the concept for his Rockwell project with his wife, Michele, in the early 1990s. The couple visited a Norman Rockwell museum, and it was there that they learned how unkind critics had been to Rockwell.

"They didn't think the America that he painted was idyllic and didn't really exist — conjured up in his mind," Rivoli said. "I looked at my wife and said this isn't true. I've got a lot of these images on film already."

Over the years Rivoli started collecting images on the side, putting them away in hopes of one day publishing a book. He initially planned on using one Rockwell image as kind of a touchstone for his own images "because they themselves had a Rockwellesque feel to them."

But about two years ago, as his wife began to do research online, the couple found that many of Rivoli's photographs paired well with Rockwell's artwork. From there "it kind of grew into this search of Norman Rockwell's America over the years," Rivoli said.