This image was taken in June 1975. I’m the kid with all the black curly hair, back row, towards the left. I vividly remember taking this photo. I helped my uncle Gerard Rinaldi (back row, black beard, looks like trouble) set up his Nikon F2 Photomic with a motordrive. If you look carefully on the far right side of the image … there is a black wire laying on the ground. Four generations of my Italian-American family together for a brief moment.
Born in Stamford, Connecticut Rob spent a lot of time with his extended Italian-American family working. All kinds of work. Lawn work, gardening, carpentry, stone walls, welding. (As a very young kid, Rob would “help” out at his grandparent’s art supply store in Old Greenwich, CT.) Work was important. Work was the focus. Work and meals together. Being only a 45-minute train ride outside of NYC, young Robby got to dip into a lot of art culture and fell in love with his lifelong passion.
Rob went to State University of New York at Purchase. He got to spend a great deal of time studying photography with Jan Groover, Jed Devine and John Cohen. He worked in the woodshop with Ken Strickland and spent some time in the metal shop.
Rob decided, since he was in the art-school-mode, to get a graduate degree. He applied to one school, The Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore MD. He got an interview and at the end was casually asked, “Where else have you applied.” Rob replied, “nowhere.” The interviewer was stunned. “What if you don’t get accepted?” and Rob replied, “Ah, well, I guess I won’t be coming then.” Rob spent two years working with Jack Wilgus, Jeff Gates and William Larson.
After grad school, Rob moved back to Stamford and started working as a photo assistant with area photographers in Fairfield County, CT and Westchester County, NY. Eventually Rob focused on just a handful of studios where his curiosity and fabrication skills were keeping him more engaged. Rob spent a lot of time with Fred Collins Studio doing everything from helping to build room sets, developing a lot of film and helping solve problems.
After eight years of doing photography, Rob felt it was time for a change. Commercial photography (though good money) didn’t fulfill his aesthetic needs. (It might have had something to do with taking too many coupon shots of tampon boxes on gauzy backgrounds.)
Running parallel to Rob’s experiences at art school and commercial photography was a curiosity for mechanical things. Tractors to be exact, but also motorcycles, trucks and the like. In 1986, Rob’s uncle Gerard Rinaldi, had started a small newsletter about an old Ford tractor he had rescued off a junk pile in 1970. Rob helped with the little newsletter, coming home from SUNY Purchase to help work on an IBM PC with dual floppy disk drives to help lay it out. The N-News Magazine grew over the years and when Gerard retired from 30 years of teaching, he focused on the N-News full time for a few years, but eventually, he wanted more free time. Rob bought the N-News from Gerard in 1998 and moved to Vermont.