Photographer Sharon Devereux to Exhibit, Sign Book of Street Photographs

The room at the top of the stairs in Sharon Devereux’s home might be called the photograph room. The space holds large 16-by-20 inch prints of some of her photographs, many of cityscapes and buildings.  Her computer holds so many images she needs more computer storage space.

In the last 12 months, Devereux has had her work exhibited at four juried group shows and in a solo show and released a book of photographs with a fellow photographer.

She’ll be signing the book, “Street Stage—Takin’ It To The Streets,” in Stoneham, at the Griffin Museum of Photograph’s Gallery at Stoneham Theatre on July 28 from 6 to 7:30 p.m.

The book focuses on street performers—buskers—in New York, Toronto, San Diego and New England, including Boston. Devereux and professional photographer Robert Hunt shot those photographs over roughly 12 months in 2010. The book was published this past December.

An exhibit of her work will hang at the theater gallery from July 28 to Aug. 29.

So you might think she’s worked as a photographer for years.

Not quite.

Devereux has been interested in photography since she was a child.  As a student, she tried interior design, fashion design, graphic design and photography. After earning a degree in interior design, she and her former husband started and ran a “very successful” architecture and interior design firm with about six employees for 18 years. The firm focused on commercial space.

Only relatively recently has she begun to consider photography as a possible career.  Three years ago, Devereux attended a festival in Boston geared to children with her sister and her sister’s family. Devereux was taking pictures. She wandered off on her own. On the Common, she saw brides having their pictures taken. The then-recently divorced Devereux (married name: Porcaro) remembers thinking, “I’m happy and not alone,” totally engaged in picture-taking.

“I think,” the Woburn resident for four years remembers saying to herself, “I found my passion.”

She joined a photography group, the Boston Photography Center, met photographer Robert Hunt, who photographed weddings and worked as his assistant. “If you can shoot weddings,” she said he told her, “you can do anything.” She enjoyed a stint doing wedding photography, “getting involved with families.”

Before the book came out, Devereux helped Hunt with an exhibit at a cultural center in East Boston. She and Hunt did a show together.

Her photos of East Boston, shot as part of a group project with other photographers from the Boston Photography Center, hung as part of a group show at the Moakley Courthouse a year ago, from July through September.  Among her photographs from that project:  a series on the “Madonna Shrine.”

Buoyed by those experiences, Devereux decided to enter her work in a juried show, “to see what would happen.” She submitted five photographs for an exhibit in Framingham, at the Fountain Street Fine Art gallery. Three are cityscapes in snow; two, New York street scenes.  The curator of a photography museum told her, she said, not to be upset if only one submission was accepted. All five of hers hung in the show.

She submitted work for three other exhibits. The Danforth Museum in Framingham accepted one of her photographs for display.

Another of her photographs hung in a second exhibit at the Framingham Fountain Street Fine Art gallery.  The show theme's theme:  “Industrial Strength.” Her photograph shows a tall turnstile at a T station, backlit by fiery red-orange light.

With “all these photographs living in my computer, I want to share them,” Devereux said, “because they excite me.”

Photography allows Devereux “to capture the unique moments I see, and in an instant, create an image forever frozen in time,” she wrote in her artist’s statement for her first Fountain Street exhibit.  “I place a frame around the world and sculpt an image from the bigger picture.”

She enjoys hearing people talk about her work, she said. Sometimes she hasn’t even thought about things they see, she said, in her work.

Unlike interior design and architecture projects, which can take a long time to complete, be changed—and maybe never even done at all, Devereux’s photographs are “just mine,” she said. “No one can change them.”

Looking ahead, Devereux (sha.devereux@gmail.com) may incorporate all of her background and focus on real estate photography—maybe even staging and photographing properties.

With her huge collection of her own photographs, Devereux has hung few of them in her home.  But her camera bag, heavy, she said, with her Canon camera and different lenses, sits in her living room, “like an appendage,” ready for action at a moment’s notice. Two lenses sit on a shelf under her TV, like decorative accessories.

Shooting digital photos, Devereux is not a fan of developing film in a darkroom. “I really want,” she said, “to just take pictures.”