Amherst Bulletin – Half a Century of Photography: Forbes Library Exhibition Features Vintage Work and Worldviews of Photographer and Digital Printmaker Stan Sherer

When Stan Sherer was growing up in the Bronx, New York, in the 1950s, an uncle once visited his family and brought darkroom equipment from World War II.

Sherer didn’t know it at the time, but he was about to find his life’s calling — starting when he and an older brother turned their apartment bathroom into a darkroom.

When it came to photography, Sherer says, “I was fascinated.”

Now, at 77, the longtime Northampton photographer and digital printmaker offers a snapshot of his career in a retrospective exhibition in the Forbes Library’s Hosmer Gallery, with images dating back more than 50 years that highlight his talent for capturing the details of people’s lives, from the Valley to Europe, West Africa, the Middle East and Asia.

From vintage New York street scenes in the 1960s to portraits of workers from Ghana, France, Albania, Russia and here in the Valley, the exhibit, which runs through June 29, also features l Sherer’s interest in black and white photography, although he occasionally works in color, particularly with his digital prints.

The exhibition also marks a turning point in his career. Sherer, who has exhibited his work in the United States, Europe and China, is donating most of his extensive archive – prints, negatives and digital files – to the Special Collections and University Archives of the WEB Du Bois Library at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

He also provides many local images to Forbes.

“I didn’t want anyone else to take responsibility for that,” he said in a recent interview at his exhibition. “I had to find a place for (the materials) so they didn’t end up in a dumpster.”

The gift to UMass makes sense in several ways. Earlier in his career, Sherer worked as a photojournalist for a number of defunct area newspapers, including The Holyoke Transcript, and as a freelancer for the Associated Press and United Press International. But he also spent nearly 20 years as a photographer for the Campus Chronicle, the former UMass newspaper for faculty and staff.

And after retiring from UMass when the Chronicle closed in 2003 due to budget cuts, Sherer, who had first studied photography at the City College of New York, returned to the university as as a student to obtain an MFA in photography. But at the suggestion of some faculty and staff, he instead studied printmaking, which he says opened up a whole new visual world for him.

Digital techniques such as photopolymer plate printing, in which a photographic image is transferred to a polymer plate and then printed, can be “a beautiful process”, says Sherer, creating a particularly sharp tactile image that can be mounted on a range of different media. paper and other surfaces.

His exhibition includes several examples of this work, in which he introduced other colors and images to create kaleidoscopic, almost 3D digital prints based on initial photos of original materials – such as metal models that Dorothy Wrinch, a mathematician and English biochemist of the early 20th century. theorist, designed to represent protein structures.

Vintage black and white

The heart of the Hosmer Gallery exhibition, however, lies in Sherer’s large-scale black-and-white photographs, developed primarily the old-fashioned way: in darkrooms. A section is devoted to images from Ghana and some other West African countries, which he visited in the late 1970s.

“I was at a point in my life where I really needed to see the world,” said Sherer, who asked the Associated Press’s London bureau to cover his expenses during a three-and-a-half-month trip. It was the first time he had gone abroad, he notes.

Traveling and living simply, Sherer captured striking portraits: a man in Mali carrying a huge sack of flour, his face, arms and clothes dusted with white; a woman emptying a bucket of fish on the banks of the Niger River in Mali; a man in Ghana pounding a container of yams and plantains to make fufu, a popular food for dipping in soups and stews.

Communication was mostly limited to gestures, Sherer said, so in some cases he took his photos somewhat surreptitiously, including a portrait of a tough-looking man wrapped in a headdress who was traveling with Sherer on a ferry on the Niger River.

In the 1990s, Sherer and his wife, Marjorie Senechal, a writer and former professor of mathematics and history of science at Smith College, traveled to Albania, a country closed to the West for decades. His images of the country’s mountainous north depict a rugged land where some rural people seemed to live in a way that hasn’t changed much in centuries, like a woman baking bread in a stone fireplace.

Sherer had received a Fulbright grant to photograph in Albania, and he and Sénéchal published a book in 1997, “Long Live Your Children!” A Portrait of Upper Albania”, which documented their experience and the lives of the people they met.

“It’s a beautiful country and the people we met were wonderful,” he said, noting that he and Sénéchal had made several trips to Albania over the years. (Sherer also published several other thematic volumes of his photos.)

Elsewhere in the exhibition, Sherer’s keen eye for documentary detail captures timeless and sometimes humorous images, such as a pair of monkeys, dressed in little shirts and pants, during a rest period at the Moscow circus.

And in what appears to be a typical photo from France, an elderly shoemaker in Paris, wearing a beret and surrounded by shoes and tools in his cramped workspace, leans with his hands cupped near the end of a small cigarette protruding from his lips.

“I always loved photographing people at work in their stores,” said Sherer, who turned his master’s thesis into a previous exhibition focusing on shopkeepers, including several from Northampton.

Speaking of local angles, a photo in the exhibit that could be considered the piece de resistance shows Bud Warnock, an employee of the old Northampton State Hospital, exiting through the small door of an oven that he was cleaning.

Choosing what to display at the Hosmer Galley among thousands of photographs “was definitely a challenge,” Sherer said. But while sifting through the negatives of his early work in New York, he says, he made an interesting discovery.

“I haven’t changed my style of photography since I started when I was 19 or 20,” he said. “I’ve been consistent.”

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