MEMBER SHOW PROFILE // Claire Sheprow's Photography Captures The Intimacy Behind The Entertainer

 

At the 3rd Ward Member Show this Friday, November 18, you'll be able to check out a wide range of amazing creations that represent our diverse community, including photographs by Claire Sheprow.

Sheprow is experienced in a wide range of photography and has been honored with multiple awards for her work. She's cultivated such diversity with a unique openness to the images that she sees in the world. "To me, there are portraits to be made of shadows, and stories to be told about landscapes, abstractions to be found in faces and so on," she says. "The feeling I experience while creating the images is what I'm trying to capture and to convey—the dialogue between me and the subject, whatever it is."

For Friday's Member Show, Sheprow is presenting portraits of local variety and burlesque performer Anna Copacabana. "Her variety show is a very public appearance involving wigs and lots of flash, but I knew immediately that I was interested in shooting a more intimate side of her real-life persona, which for me started with shooting her without her signature wigs," she says. "We met to talk about the concept I had in mind, and were both enthused. However, as things would have it, the shoot didn't come to happen until about a year and a half later. Which was actually quite wonderful, because in that span of time we became quite good friends, which only deepened the silent dialogue between us during the shoot and opened up the amazing vulnerability and intimacy of her story that I wanted to capture."

Hit the jump to read more about Sheprow and see more of her work.

As a successful photographer whose clients have included Gibson and Fender guitars, Time Out NY, Glamour, MTV and many others, Sheprow finds that 3rd Ward is a good place to recharge and stay connected with herself. "Although I pour all of my creative energy and voice into my professional work, when meeting the needs of clients, editors, and art directors the lines between my 'art' and 'work' sometimes become painfully blurred," she says. "3rd Ward has become a space for me to carve out time for my own personal work, and to reconnect with a voice that is deeply my own. Taking classes to re-spark my creativity, hanging work in the shows, and just being in a community of such talent and creative energy, witnessing the work being created around me has really helped me to refocus on my personal work separate from my professional work."

What's Sheprow up to as we speak? "Currently I'm in the Arizonian desert exploring various means of self-discovery and the complex stories of the people who come here to experience them," she says. "Hearing their past stories and daydreaming about the future paths their lives may or may not take beyond these 'life-changing experiences.'  However I hope to be back just in time to attend the Member Show!"

-- John Ruscher