Michele Turre - Picturing Northampton - Exhibitions

Main Street, South Side, 2003 Archival inkjet print on rag paper
18 x 24 1/8 in
Courtesy of the artist
© Michele Turre

Michele Turre

The edges, fringes and backsides of the places we inhabit can tell us so much more than the polished, picture-postcard side. Accordingly, I’ve taken two concentric and complementary points of view in my exploration of Northampton. In one, I’ve traveled to the literal extremities of the city to photograph, over the course of a year, every location where a road intersects the town line. In the other I’ve photographed the “backside” of the center of town.

The photographs taken along the town line are bound in a coverless, spiral book: Start anywhere, there’s no first or last page. A map on the verso of each of the 25 pages locates the scene. These are mostly undramatic locations. Between places. Non-places. Sometimes the boundary is marked by a sign, sometimes merely by a change in the pavement, or the end of utility services. These may be places you pass by daily, or infrequently, if ever. Can you find your habitual route into or out of Northampton?

The backside of downtown is where you so often end up parking your car, or cutting through on-foot on a shortcut between errands. This area changes more slowly, and holds more history, than the front of Main Street. Records of change are preserved out in the open; additions to buildings, bricked-up windows, signs for businesses long closed. Life at the backdoors of downtown is slower and more utilitarian than on its dressed-up sidewalks.

Biography

Born in Oakland, California, 1953. Lives in Conway, Massachusetts.

Michele Turre received a B.F.A in Printmaking from the University of Iowa and an M.F.A. in Computer Arts, Photography and Design from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is currently on the faculty of Hampshire College, where she teaches courses in Digital Photography and New Media in the Film and Photography Program. She also works as a multimedia designer for Academic Computing at the University of Massachusetts. Turre’s digital photography and Web-based projects have been exhibited at SIGGRAPH and the International Society of Electronic Arts, and is included in the ArtBase archive of Internet art at rhizome.org. Her paintings, book arts, and prints have been shown at museums and galleries across North America.