By Marty Snapp

Jed Devine – photographer, teacher, husband, father and grandfather – passed away on October 29, 2024. He died at home on Martha’s Vineyard, surrounded by his second wife Barbara Kassel, his son Jesse Devine, and his daughter Siobhan Devine.

At Yale he captained the baseball team and received his BA in fine arts and MFA in graphic design. After graduate school he focused on photography, notably the black-and-white palladium prints for which he was known. He exhibited with Daniel Wolf and then Benrubi Gallery in New York City. In 1986 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship for his photographs of Central Park’s Bethesda Terrace.

Jed’s photography is represented in many major museums, corporate, university and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Victoria and Albert Museum; London; the International Center of Photography, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Art; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Eastman House, Rochester.

Jed had a long teaching career, primarily at SUNY Purchase, where he was head of the visual arts department for a time. He delighted in working with students, many of whom became lifelong friends. He and his first wife, dancer Emily Erda Devine, raised Jesse and Siobhan in an artist’s loft in Manhattan and on Friendship Long Island, Maine. In the book that Jed published with his Loomis classmate Jim Dinsmore about the island, titled Friendship, he called his children “his most insightful and candid critics and his greatest blessings.”

“Jed and Tom Judson from Deerfield Academy, and Bill Dean and I from Roosevelt High School in Des Moines, roomed together as freshmen in Vanderbilt Hall and became lifelong friends,” says Jim Freeland. “At Yale, he introduced me to art, and art history became an important part of my Yale education. Jed was a serious intellectual with a great sense of humor and deep compassion. His later life with his wife, painter Barbara Kassel, was productive and happy. He leaves behind a legacy of teaching, art and human connection.

“Jed got a Master’s degree from Yale and began teaching at Loomis and spending summers camping on Friendship Long Island, one half mile off the coast of Maine near where his Loomis colleague Jim Dinsmore and his family had moved.

“From Loomis, he embarked on a teaching career at SUNY in Purchase, NY, and continued to pursue photography, having revived the palladium printing process and using a large view finder camera. He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1986. His work is found in private collections and museums throughout the world. His book Friendship was a collection of his Maine photographs and Jim Dinsmore’s letters from the island.

“In 1979, when Jed’s son Jesse and my son Jed were three years old, I bought an old summer house on Davis Point in Friendship, Maine, and spend the next 16 summers in close contact with the Devine family. That world consisted of boats, fishing, hikes, picnics, whiffle ball and badminton, tennis, foraging for mussels, clams and berries, country fairs, campfires, waiting out storms, long visits, and Red Sox games on the radio. Our children were best friends, and Jed was an important influence on both my sons and a good friend to my first wife Susan and my present wife Deborah. Our lives later went in separate directions, but we always kept in touch.

“Jed and I go way back,” says Barbara. “We met in 1962, in the ‘baby’ painting class offered to Yale College undergraduates. I knew at once that I was encountering a formidable presence. Right off the bat (baseball reference intended), I was in awe of his painting chops. He was already a painter; he could have taught the class. The same may be said of his draftsmanship. If he knew how good he was, he didn’t show it. He could have been full of himself but wasn’t. Down to earth he ever was, as all who know him know.”

He and Barbara remained together for the rest of his life. As a couple, they influenced and contributed to each other’s work throughout twenty-three years together in Manhattan, Maine and Martha’s Vineyard. In 2015 they had a joint exhibition at the Clark Gallery, titled Musings.

In 2010 health concerns led Jed to explore digital color photographs that he described as “wildly gregarious,” illustrating his determination to turn setbacks into blessings. Even in the face of serious heart disease, he lived life fully and said he felt very lucky. His grandchildren knew him as the most playful Grandpa around. As he wrote toward the end, “I’m just a kid, hoping to play a few more innings before it gets dark.”