AN AMBULATORY interview with Stephen Shore at last year’s Photo London was refreshingly informal. Pausing to say something before one of his photographs on display, he would then stroll to another one before responding to a new question. The audience of some 25 or so followed in tow and because of his quiet voice it would gather tightly around him when he spoke. Watching from a staircase above, there was a solemnity to the event that took on a religious aspect: Shore as messiah, ardently trailed by devotees who clung to every word, desiring to be as close as possible, as if rapture might be imminent.
Photographer: Stephen Shore. American Surfaces. © Stephen Shore. Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York
Rewind to the 1970s, when the first exhibitions of his work took place in New York – first at the Light Gallery, then the Met and MoMA – and the response to them verged on one of derision. For starters, they were in colour: if photography were to aspire to being an art form, only black-and-white images were acceptable. Colour was trashy, reserved for the vulgar world of advertising. To add insult to aesthetic injury, they were exhibited unframed and, at the Light Gallery were taped to a wall using double-sided sticky tape. Most egregiously, Shore did not develop his prints creatively in a darkroom but sent them to a camera shop which forwarded the film to Kodak for processing and printing.
Photographer: Stephen Shore. Clovis, New Mexico, June 1972. © Stephen Shore. Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York
In his first photobook, American Surfaces, Shore’s dedication reads: ‘The camera store was managed by Julie Ander. A total of 16 years earlier, he had sold my father my first 35mm camera. I bought every camera I owned during the intervening years from Julie. His encouragement was meaningful to me. He was a man of compassion and depth. This book is dedicated to him.’
As well as how he photographed, the subject matter aroused exercised critics. It was not conventionally artistic and it would be 1999 before American Surfaces appeared in print. The photographs, based on a road trip from New York City to Amarillo, Texas that he began at the age of 24 in 1972, were of motels, diner restaurants, portraits, gas stations, refrigerators, cars, street intersections and the like. They were not cropped or staged, he used a flash and glamour was decidedly absent.
Photographer: Stephen Shore. 236 West Palm Beach Florida American Surfaces. © Stephen Shore.
Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York
American Surfaces has been revised and expanded for a new publication by Phaidon that brings this classic photobook back to life. Its twin, from MACK, is a previously unpublished set of photographs from the 1970s: Transparencies: Small Camera Works-1971-1979. After his first road trip, Shore began work on a new project and switched to using a large-format 8X10-inch camera and the result was Uncommon Places (1982). However, he still felt the need for a more compact camera and as he continued to journey across America he also carried a 35mm Leica or Rollei and used slide film. These photographs make up Transparencies and they continue his quest for the vernacular.
Photographer: Stephen Shore. Transparencies Small Camera Works 1971–1979. © Stephen Shore.
Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York
Both these publications record Shore’s abiding concern with the prosaic in all its everydayness. This was art of the absolutely ordinary, without affect, judgement or interpretation. The idea of a split between appearance and reality, such a familiar trope in art criticism, was abandoned in favour of just seeing how things present themselves to us as appearances. It has taken some forty years to recognise Stephen Shore’s achievement and these two books are testimony to his place in the canon of American photography.
Photographer: Stephen Shore. Transparencies Small Camera Works 1971–1979 © Stephen Shore.
Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York
Photographing what is ordinary now passes muster partly because Shore drew attention to appearances that are so taken for granted that in one sense we fail to see them. Although he was not in the business of re-enchanting reality he recognised that the quotidian is as worthy of our attention as the more obviously sublime or spectacular. Wilde’s aphorism in The Picture of Dorian Gray is aptly quoted in the introduction to Phaidon’s American Surfaces: ‘It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances.
The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.’ Similarly, the introduction to Transparencies notes how Shore, referring to the 35mm photographs he took in the early-to-mid 1970s, explained that he was interested in ‘making photographs that were the equivalent of how people talked: ordinary speech, as opposed to the formality of writing.
Photographer: Stephen Shore. Transparencies Small Camera Works 1971-1979. © Stephen Shore.
Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York
Shore’s travel trips led to a new road map that helped enlarge the topography available for photographers. His pictures may now seem very familiar, banal even, but at the time he was doing something with a camera that very few in the art establishment thought worth of attention.
by Sean Sheehan