Introduction
Along with William Eggleston, Stephen Shore was one of the pioneering American photographers who showed that colour photography was a genuine vehicle to show photography as a form of artistic expression.
He too photographed banal scenes and objects in colour at a time when black and white was the accepted format, it was recognised as being the medium for documentary and historical relevance, colour photography was used in advertising and fashion but was not taken seriously to represent as art. Whilst Shore was exhibiting his first show at The Light Gallery New York in 1972 he had lunch with photographer revered modernist Paul Strand who said that:
“Higher emotions couldn’t be communicated with colour” [Stephen Shore: American Surfaces, 2011]
This was to be a opinion that was to be radically disproved throughout the 1970’s, with Shore, Eggleston and Joel Meyerowitz producing and achieving recognition in the genre of colour art photography.
Early Career
Stephen Shore received his first 35mm camera when he was six, his interest was originally sparked when an uncle had previously given him a darkroom kit that he had been using to develop and print family images. In 1958 he was given a copy of Walker Evans’ ‘American Photographs’ which was to be a key influence on his development and pursuance of photography.
Stephen Shore began his photography career in earnest in 1961 when aged fourteen, Shore called MoMA’s Director of Photography (Edward Steichen no less), and asked Steichen if he could show him his work – Steichen bought three photos!
There was no looking back from here and by the time Shore was seventeen he was already a member of the emerging New York Conceptual and Pop art scene. This was to inevitably to lead to a meeting with Andy Warhol in 1965, who was impressed enough in Shore’s work that he offered an open invitation to Warhol’s studio ‘The Factory’. After two years Shore had produced a large collection of the activities of the studio and it’s members. He also pursued his own conceptual and photographic art by exhibiting at the artistically renowned ‘Light Gallery’.
His work became so recognised that in 1971, aged twenty-four, he was offered his first major solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, this was only the second show by a living photographer at the Met.
After the Met exhibition Shore said: :
“It was a shock to my system, I wasn’t really prepared for it…. and forced me into a new direction” [Being Stephen Shore, 2010]
In 1972 Shore set out on a new direction and what was to become a number of road trips in which he photographically diarised the trip across America.
This was to produce ‘American Surfaces‘ which was exhibited at the Light Gallery in 1972 although the book wasn’t published until 1999, and would also later in 1982 produce the highly acclaimed ‘Uncommon Places‘.
Aesthetic
“Something in the structure of a picture that can communicate the taste of an age” – Stephen Shore
Stephen Shore’s images have an identifiable signature to them, obviously in the colour and also in the composition or structure in his essay on how he composes his images Shore defines structure:
“I think of “structure” rather than “composition” because “composition” refers to a synthetic process, such as painting. A painter starts with a blank canvas. Every mark he or she makes adds complexity. A photographer, on the other hand, starts with the whole world. Every decision he or she makes brings order….A photographer doesn’t put together an image; a photographer selects.” [Shore, 2012]
In this essay Shore also describes how his ‘structural complexity’ had changed by comparing the differences between two images, the less complex structure of image a compared to that of image b which was taken a year later. They both have the basic composition of a “one-point perspective with vanishing point in the centre of the image”. Image b has “ever increasing visual complexity” which as Shore says “Photographers have to impose order, bring structure to what they photograph.” [Shore, 2012].
In a further expansion of this Shore describes the importance and significance of the frame, when being interviewed about the book ‘The Nature of Photographs’ which was developed out of his course at Bard College where he is Director of Photography:
“In some images, the frame acts as the end of the picture. I may want to take a portrait of you, and decide and decide where your face is going to go in the picture, and then I’m aware of the frame. The picture simply has to end somewhere, and I make the decision on where that is. But often with the view camera, the frame is not the end but the beginning of the picture. It’s as though the photographer starts with the frame and builds the picture in from the frame.” [Sante, 2007]
“I loved snapshots” – Stephen Shore
Stephen Shore had an interest in postcards and snapshots which would set the generic format for the images, indeed ‘American Surfaces’ was exhibited as snapshots at the Light Gallery in 1972. He also wanted to document the journey as a diary
“I really need to approach in a different way….at random moments taking a ‘screenshot’ of my field of vision… what does it look like to see it?” [Stephen Shore: American Surfaces, 2011]
This is also a similar view that the street photographer Gary Winogrand had when he said :
“I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed” – Gary Winogrand
“I wanted to make a photographic diary of the trip: every meal I ate, every person I met, every bed I slept in, every toilet I used, every town I drove through.” – Stephen Shore.
“Every culture, every age, has a palette” – Stephen Shore
Shore’s images are perhaps synonymous with colour, the hue seems to make the colours add history to the image, for example the colours this image seem to evoke the hue of the 70’s as Shore puts it :
“Every culture, every age, has a palette to communicate something of the age I’m living in, there’s something about colour that I can’t communicate in black and white” [Stephen Shore: American Surfaces, 2011]
Texture also enhances the historical feel as this image with the colour and texture of the lamp in a hotel room, the TV adds authentic content to this perception. The technical tools also contribute to Shore’s overall aesthetic, perhaps best described by Maria Morris, who was a curatorial intern in the photography department at MoMA in a short essay for his ‘Photographs by Stephen Shore’ exhibition in 1976 [Morris, 1976]:
“His technique urges the medium to its most ambitious descriptive extension; the large stand camera and 8″ x 10″ color negative film render detail, hue, and texture as precisely as the state of the art allows”
Influences
The first major influence on Stephen Shore was Walker Evans, he was given Walker Evans’ American Photos by a neighbour when he was ten. Shore highlighted Evan’s impact on him in an interview with photographer Gregory Crewdson for Photo District News in 2011 [Crewdson, 2011]:
“I would say it was more than an influence. Emmet Gowin (photographer) once came to Bard and referred to feeling a spiritual kinship to someone. There’s something in my temperament that just connects to [Evans]. The word that comes to mind is classical, in terms of an understanding of the relationship of structure and content, and an empathetic distance.”
Although not greatly mentioned Andy Warhol must’ve had a great influence on Shore. Working daily in the presence of other artists in Warhol’s ‘Factory’ Shore became aware of the decision- making process:
“That’s the most important thing.” – Stephen Shore
Unsurprisingly the Warhol experience also brought serialisation to Shore’s notice: [Tillman, n.d.] ” Warhol worked in a serial vein and I began to think about images, about serial projects” . Over the next couple of years John Coplan’s ‘Serial Imagery’ book was to have a great effect and would lead Shore thinking about serial and sequential imagery that was to be used as a body of work for the Metropolitan Exhibition in 1971.
In an interview with Susanne Lange Shore says that “my work is in the tradition of Atget and Walker Evans” [Lange, 2008]. But perhaps the bigger and more obvious influences were that of Bernd and Hilla Becher and Ed Rushca.
Bernd and Hilla Becher were best known for their typologies of industrial buildings and structures (The Water Towers was the first time I came across their work). Shore’s first encounter with their work was when their book Anonyme Skulpturen was published in 1970, this book contained images of blast-furnaces, winding-towers , water towers, gas-holders and silos etc.
” When I look at work by the Bechers, I see the structures with a new appreciation of them. I see differences in style, period and culture. And this understanding is intensified by the taxonomy of the presentation.” [Lange, 2008]
The influence of Ed Rushca is more obvious though. He produced a series of works of the vernacular photography of urban landscapes (Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations, Every building on the Sunset Strip and Thirty-Four parking lots in Los Angeles). When you look at these, especially the gas stations the influence is obvious.
“Rusha’s work may have caused irritation in some parts of the art world, but for me and my friends his books were a delight.” [Lange, 2008]
It is also not surprising that William Eggleston said that he was also greatly influenced by Ed Rushca.
In summary Stephen Shore states ” At the time I was interested in working in series…..They (Bechers and Rushca) both worked in series. Their work is intellectual underpinning. They examined the everday, neglected, built environment. And they did it in a rather dead-pan way: avoiding “artistic” inflection.” [Lange, 2008]
My View
About a year ago I attended a one day workshop in Landscape Photography run by Lorentz Gullachsen ( who also happens to be an OCA tutor), he gave us a suggested list of landscape photographers to view their work, Stephen Shore was on this list. I had a brief look at his work and obviously noticed that these were urban landscapes, but at the time my knowledge of landscape photography was purely looking at and understanding ‘visually pleasing’ pictures, it was somewhat superficial. In fact it wasn’t much different to what Shore thought of the quality of photography being produced in the 1960’s, when he was starting at Andy Warhol’s The Factory:
“What I had been exposed to was largely what I think of as ‘camera club’ mentality. There was a critique group in the city, but the pictures were terrible…There was no particular intentionality, no realistic aesthetic intelligence behind the photography.” [Tillman, n.d.]
My knowledge at that time was ‘Camera club’ mentality, so saw Shore’s images as ‘snapshots’, which would have been somewhere what Shore would have wanted, but to think of them with just that shallow viewpoint does not do Shore justice.
It’s this ‘aesthetic intelligence’ that I think is a great description of what Shore is about. He pays great attention to ‘structuring’ a picture, as already mentioned above in Shore’s essay titled ‘Form and Pressure’, he compares the structure between two of his images to show how his photography had evolved and improved. In the Beverly and La Brea – the image with greater structural complexity, Shore describes the relationship between the ‘Standard’ sign and the light pole underneath, which is an example of when a “3- dimensional space is collapsed into a flat picture, objects in the foreground are now seen, on the surface of the photograph, in a new and precise relationship to the objects in the background. I was interested to se how many of these visual interstices I could juggle on single image” [Shore, 2012] .
In his book ‘The Nature of Photographs’ Shore clarifies and further simplifies his theory on what three layers structure an image:
- “The Physical Level – The photograph is flat, it has edges, and it is static; it doesn’t move. While it is flat, it is not a true plane. The print has a physical dimension.
- The Depictive Level – Photography is an inherently analytic discipline…..A photographer simplifies the jumble by giving it structure. He or she imposes this order by choosing a vantage point, choosing a frame, choosing a moment of exposure and by selecting a plane of focus.”
- The Mental Level – of a photograph provides a framework for the mental image we construct of (and for ) a picture.” [Shore, 1998]
I’ve had this book for a few months now and had read it a couple of times (there are few words but many words aren’t needed). It’s only when I started reading it again after doing this, more detailed, research into Stephen Shore that it is ‘beginning’ and I mean beginning to make sense.
My interpretation of these tenets is that Shore is asking us to look at an image as a flat object but it has a physical element by what it contains in terms of structure, form and content. To look more deeply into the presentation of the image as to what it means mentally to an individual.
This is all interesting in that it presents another level of viewing and appreciating the image, it shows the ‘aesthetic intelligence’ contained within Shore’s images.
Bibliography
Stephen Shore: American Surfaces. (2011). Armory Show New York: Spike Productions.
Being Stephen Shore. (2010). Paris: Spike Productions
Shore, S. (2012). Form and Pressure. [online] Stephen Shore. Available at: http://stephenshore.net/writing/formandpressure.pdf [Accessed 6 Jul. 2014].
Morris, M. (1976). Photographs by Stephen Shore. [online] Stephen Shore. Available at: http://stephenshore.net/press/moma.pdf [Accessed 6 Jul. 2014].
Sante, L. (2007). Stephen Shore interviewed by Luc Sante. [online] Stephen Shore. Available at: http://stephenshore.net/press/Aperture_Apr_07.pdf [Accessed 6 Jul. 2014].
Crewdson, G. (2011). Heroes & Mentors: Stephen Shore and Gregory Crewdson. [online] Pdnonline.com. Available at: http://www.pdnonline.com/features/Heroes-and-Mentors-St-3200.shtml [Accessed 7 Jul. 2014].
Bibliography: Lange, S. (2008). A conversation with Stephen Shore. [online] StephenShore. Available at: http://stephenshore.net/writing/lange.pdf [Accessed 7 Jul. 2014].
Tillman, L. (n.d.). Stephen Shore in a conversation with Lynne Tillman. [online] imagineallthepeople. Available at: http://imagineallthepeople.info/shore.pdf [Accessed 7 Jul. 2014].
Shore, S. (1998). The nature of photographs. 1st ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press
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