Stephen Shore
Stephen Shore's new book The Nature of Photographs: A Primer, published by Phaidon, grew out of the years he has spent teaching a course called 'Photographic Seeing' at Bard College, New York State, where Shore is still Director of the Photography Department. The book's aim is to give anyone interested in photography - whether you like taking pictures or looking at them - a way of understanding how the three-dimensional world gets translated into the flat plane of a photograph. At a recent talk in London to mark the publication of the book, Stephen Shore spoke about his own trajectory as a photographer, and how the questions he asked himself when he began seriously to look at other people's photographs and make his own have informed his entire approach to understanding 'the visual grammar of photography'.
When Stephen Shore was just 6 years old his uncle gave him a Kodak set. By the age of 9 he had mastered a 35mm manual camera and was taking his first colour pictures. When he was 10 he was given a copy of Walker Evans's American Photographs, the first photography book he ever owned. Even at that young age Shore felt 'a kinship' with Evans and, as he articulates in his own new book, Evans' work came to define for him 'the basis of a photograph's visual grammar'. Evans's pictures summed up for Shore what was going on 'when the world in front of the camera is being transformed into a photograph': 'four attributes come into play...flatness, frame, time and focus'. It is the presence - or absence - of these four properties that Shore explores in The Nature of Photography, whether it be in his own work or in images taken from the history of photography including of William Eggleston, Garry Winogrand and, more recently,Thomas Struth.
Garry Winogrand, Texas State Fair, Dallas, 1964
Copyright Estate of Garry Winogrand, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
Thomas Struth, Paradise 09 (Xi Shuang Banna), Yunnan Province, China, 1999
Copyright Thomas Struth, 2005
At the age of 14 Stephen Shore called up Edward Steichen, then the head of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and asked if he could show him his portfolio. 'I didn't know you weren't supposed to do that sort of thing. I guess if I had been 30, he would not have agreed to see me.' Steichen invited the young Shore to the museum and by the end of their session together Steichen had bought three of Shore's pictures for MOMA's collection. Now that he was part of such a presitigious museum collection Shore was obliged to fill out a form about himself for MOMA. One of the questions asked was 'What is your philosophy?' To which Shore wrote: 'I'm only 14. I don't have a philosophy yet.'
Shore dropped out of high school at the age of 17 and spent the next three years at Andy Warhol's Factory taking pictures - a hugely influential experience for Shore largely because for the first time he was witnessing an artist 'making decisions'.
In 1971 when Shore was 17 he was invited by the Metropolitan Museum in New York to have his first solo show, the youngest ever living photographer to have a solo show at the museum, and soon after Shore set off on one of his many road trips across America. Since the late 1960s he'd been flying down to spend the summers with friends in Amarillo, Texas, but this time he decided to drive, documenting every detail of his trip as he went. Shore took thousands of pictures as he drove across the country; nothing he came across was too insignificant to capture: buildings, cars, gas stations, hotel rooms, hotel toilets, plates of food, people he met - Shore aimed his camera at everything he saw, each picture part of his desire to create a documentary record America at that time but also part of his ongoing process to understand the nature of photography.
Stephen Shore, Yucatan, Mexico, 1990
Courtesy Stephen Shore
These photographs from the early 1970s would eventually be edited into book form in Uncommon Places, published in 1982, and American Surfaces, which came out in 1999, both of which are now recognised as key works in the photography canon. They are also the visual manifestation of the 'philosophy' Shore was still searching for 45 years ago when he went to see Edward Steichen, and which he so lucidly lays out in his new book The Nature of Photography.
Rebecca Wilson
The Nature of Photographs is published by Phaidon at £24.95.
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