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Fall 2004 Departments
Exchange
Around the Pond
Great Sport
Arts
Books
Foundation News
Connections
Extended Family
Zip 01003
Features
The Future's So Bright
The Prince of Pages
The Changing Face of Beauty
Campaigns: Good for What Ails Us?
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Arts
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Everyday People
Sheron Rupp ’82G captures the unbearable lightness of being
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–Charles Creekmore
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SHERON RUPP'S SLICE-OF-LIFE PHOTOGRAPHS PEER into the backyards of neighborhoods we pass by every day but never truly see. Her pictures are freeze-frames of the ordinary, brimming with secret life: families surrounded by their chockablock stuff; a timid girl peeking from behind her front door; children caught in playful mayhem. Rupp’s territory is the hidden realities of everyday people living everyday lives.
Rupp calls her impressionistic medium “the human drama of the obvious.” She uses her camera to trap “the unbearable lightness of being,” much like the nomadic shutterbug in the 1988 film of the same name.
Nowhere is Rupp’s human comedy exhibited more lovingly than in her 10 photographs contributed to “Picturing Northampton,” an exhibit mounted at Smith College Museum of Art this past summer by Aprile Gallant, the museum’s associate curator of prints, drawings and photographs. “Picturing Northampton” was inspired by the city’s 350th anniversary and represents the visions of eight local photographers emulsifying the apparent, the ethereal and the supernatural in their hometown.
“From the neat rows cultivated by a lone gardener, clad in a pristine white shirt, in his own private jungle, to the sun-soaked rural playground of balls and bikes,” Gallant writes in the exhibition catalog, “Rupp’s images are both familiar and exotic, moments of clarity frozen, so that the beauty of their form and underlying structure are revealed.”
To guarantee she wouldn’t miss the surrealism of the ordinary as she passed by, Rupp pedaled her old Raleigh bike through the byways of Leeds and Florence, along the remote floodplains of the Connecticut River, down the sleepy Victorian neighborhoods around the Smith campus. All the while she kept her third eye peeled for the metaphysical underpinnings of everyday reality.
Whenever something luminous about the people in their yards struck the lens in her mind’s eye, she’d stop. Rupp’s noninvasive method of capturing the unbearable lightness is by having a long and neighborly chat with her subjects before asking if they’d mind having their pictures snapped.
“That’s when the magic works,” she says. “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.”
Rupp has been practicing her sociable art since she first bought a camera in 1968, when it was love at first flash. Since then, she’s earned many honors, including a prestigious John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Award. Her photos have been acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, and many other notable collections.
During her three-decade career, though, she’s never lost sight of her focal point: “It is the passing daily-ness of the ordinary, the mundane, the insignificant detail, which may harbor personal meaning for our lives and others.”
http://www.smith.edu/artmuseum/exhibitions/picturing/sheron_rupp.htm |
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Everyday People
Everyday People: more images
Elespe and Plensa
Elespe and Plensa: more images
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