Sheron Rupp

Photographing people at home, on their own turf, was my intent in the project Picturing Northampton.

On my old Raleigh bicycle with my camera in the bicycle basket, I rode around various neighborhoods in Northampton looking for material that grabbed my eye (usually kids, a landscape or garden, or the stuff in people’s yards). With one exception, everyone I met was a complete stranger.

In the final selection of photographs, I became interested in a certain diversity of the places I’d found to photograph. A range of various environs in Northampton emerged: from the villages of Leeds and Florence; to remote areas along the Connecticut River; to the neighborhoods of Ryan Road, North and South Streets, and near Smith College. I consider these photographs mere descriptions, rather than sociological documents imbued with any conjecture.

What happens between me and my camera and the people I befriend to photograph is a matter of great, blessed circumstance, luck, and the incidence of time (not to mention the necessary permission and openness that folks so graciously give me). The spectacle of dramatic events is not my visual interest; it is the passing dailiness of the ordinary, the mundane, the insignificant detail, which may possibly harbor personal meaning for our lives and others’.

Biography

Born in Mansfield, Ohio, 1943. Lives in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Sheron Rupp received a B.A. in Sociology/Psychology from Denison University. She initially pursued a career in publishing, attending studio art classes at the Boston Museum School in the evenings. After discovering photography, she attended a few classes and workshops, finally deciding in 1979 to pursue her love of photography as a career. She entered the joint M.F.A. program in photography at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and Hampshire College in 1980, where she studied with Jerome Liebling, Elaine Mayes, and Abraham Ravett. Since that time, she has exhibited in one-person and group exhibitions across the United States, and has received awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the Massachusetts Artists Fellowship.