Review: Uncommon Places, Stephen Shore, 2005; Stephen Shore : New American Photography, dir. Ralph Goertz, 2010

Uncommon Places is the book that said, yes, you’ve been here.

Not the places, mind you, though I may have been to a few.  But the mindset of the photographer.  Here is someone who did what I’ve been doing, practiced as I practice.  I intuitively get what Shore was doing, because I’ve been doing the same.  (And I wonder now why none of my tutors, coursemates, or fellow enthusiasts referred me to this earlier.)

Here is how Shore describes his work at this time:

I wasn’t thinking, “Today, I’m going to shoot intersections.”  It was more, really, in a way, like the way I worked with American Surfaces.  Where, in a day, I could photograph food, and some portraits, and a toilet, and some buildings.  In a way, it’s in this funny position of being a diary, but it’s a diary of a life geared to making photographs.  So, what’s it a diary of.  It’s a diary of a photographic trip.  So it’s things I’m encountering, but it’s also things I’m encountering for the sake of encountering them.  So in American Surfaces, I was photographing almost every meal I ate, every person I met, every waiter or waitress who served me, every bed I slept in, every toilet I used.  But also, I was photographing streets I was driving through, buildings I would see.  I would pull over and say, “Okay, this is a picture I want.”  So it’s not strictly a diary.  But, to get back to your question about whether I did certain kinds of photographs on the same day.   Like in American Surfaces, I wasn’t thinking, “Today, I’m just going to do portraits”, and I didn’t think that way during this project.  In fact, what I felt about the original Uncommon Places is that a lot of these kinds of pictures [pointing to a photograph of a painting and a photograph of a television in a motel room] were edited out.  So, it was more architecture and intersections.  http://www.aaronschuman.com/shoreinterview.html 

Much of my practice the past year+ has been the same, but focused in my little area of Dubai.  For the sake of refreshing my practice, I think I need to get out more often and explore new neighborhoods.  The work I did recently in Vienna had more spark, probably from being in a new place and being stimulated by visual data.

In a recent film about Shore, which amounts to an extended interview covering the period under discussion here, he makes an important distinction about seeing fresh.  He remarks that after moving to Montana he didn’t shoot the landscape for about two years.  As someone who had spent all his life in NY, he felt not only technically inadequate about shooting what for him was an empty landscape, but also intellectually inadequate.  He felt his images would have been naive rather than filtered through some kind of cultured perspective.  And so he waited.

Jumping back to his American Surfaces - Uncommon Places period, he says he was interested in finding out why certain images had an immediacy, a quality of liveliness, freshness, or spontaneity.   He concluded the key ingredient was that they had the quality of seeing, not photographing.  That is, the photos seemed to be unconcerned with formal issues of image making.  They were, in the words of Suzuki-roshi, reflective of the beginner’s mind.  Might that quality of seeing be invigorated when deployed in new environments?  It’s hard to see with fresh eyes when you’ve passed the same scene day after day, month after month.  Is regular immersion in new environments necessary to develop, or at least strengthen, this ability?

I can also relate to Shore’s development at this time -  moving from small, hand-held cameras to working more formally with wide-frame on tripod - as I am stuck right in the middle, wanting to move up to a camera with bigger sensor and greater resolution.  I’ve promised myself to first finish Level One courses - and my MA - before investing in a camera upgrade.  Hopefully by then there will be even better cameras to choose from, though I wonder if the bigger format, and larger camera, will force on me, as it did on Shore, more deliberate choices, taking away some of the spontaneity.

As I’m moving now into portrait work, I was curious to read how Shore felt about the portraits in Uncommon Places, which to me seem to interrupt the rhythm of the presentation, to be almost out of place.

I think that, in some ways, they [the portraits] may be the more conventional of the pictures in there.  But, [pause] I just like them.  I think they’re good portraits.  Actually, what I was thinking about when you were asking the question was that there are a lot of portraits in American Surfaces, and I just love them.  And they’re not the kind of portraits that are about presenting the person as a three-dimensional character.  They’re almost looking at the people as surfaces, as cultural artifacts. And I think that looking through this work, I went in a different direction with the portraits.  Working on a tripod is very different for a portrait.  I find that, generally people are less self-conscious.  Because there’s not a camera between me and them.  The camera is not an extension of me.  It’s this tool I’m using to make something.  Also, I can pay more attention to them, because I’m not seeing them through a viewfinder, I’m seeing them with my eyes, and I’m choosing the moment just with my eyes, without a camera in between.  So, I found that I could pay more attention to expression then I had before.  http://www.aaronschuman.com/shoreinterview.html 

For those interested in checking out some of Shore’s work online:

Images
Stephen Shore:  http://stephenshore.net/
303 Gallery:  http://www.303gallery.com/
Houk Gallery:  http://www.houkgallery.com/exhibitions/2005-03-08_stephen-shore/

Reading
Interview:  http://www.aaronschuman.com/shoreinterview.html
An Autobiography of Seeing:  http://www.aaronschuman.com/shorearticle.html
American Surfaces - Uncommon Places: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/115243/stephen-shore-photography-american-surfaces-uncommon-places

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