The photo ‘Beverly Boulevard at La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, California, 21 June 1975’ from the series Uncommon Places is one of the most famous works by Stephen Shore and cannot be overlooked in the history of American photography. On the photo we see a typical American boulevard with lines of signs, gas stations, lampposts and traffic lights, seemingly chaotic and confusing, yet photographed with a geometric precision and a strong sense of the special features of everyday life. The photo is exemplary of the work of Stephen Shore, which can be considered as archaeology of the present. The use of a large camera on a tripod is crucial, he explains in this interview.

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How did Stephen Shore develop his project Uncommon Places? “It was not planned. I started with American Surfaces but I wanted a bigger negative. And there were no good medium format cameras at the time, except for the 6x6 Hasselblad. But I didn't want a square format. If in that time the Mamiya 6x7 had been available, I would definitely have chosen it. Then I bought a Crown Graphic 4x5 inch, thinking that I would hand-hold it and get these beautiful detailed negatives, of exactly the same work as I was doing with American Surfaces. But I realized already the first day that it was better to use a tripod and that I had to look at the ground glass instead of the viewfinder. And that opened a whole new world for me. I became aware of how clear the process of decisions was to make a composition. After a few days, I did not realize that the image appeared upside down. More than the ground glass, the tripod made a big difference. Once a camera is on a tripod, it changes the photographer's relationship with the camera. It is no longer an extension of the eye. The tripod makes the decisions physical. That is also one of the reasons that we do analogue photography in the first two years at the school where I teach. Because there is a difference between changing the lighting in Photoshop and making a whole new print. The latter makes the decision physical and therefore more concrete."

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New Topographers

Shore belonged to the group of new topographers, first described by the historic exhibition of William Jenkins in 1975, who did not seek the higher beauty of the landscape but rather the banal street scenes. Shore saw the expression of American culture in architecture and used that insight as his guideline. How does he see American culture? Shore sighs and takes a long breath. “There are many aspects to mention, but I immediately think of Paul Strand, who made a book called Un Paese about Luzarra, an Italian village. I photographed the village exactly forty years later. He wrote at the time to a friend that there were no buildings of architectural interest in the village. I understood that it had a completely different meaning for me, because he made a distinction between higher and lower culture. But I only look at architecture as a physical expression of cultural forces. Then it does not exist that there would not be interesting architecture, because it is always an expression of certain values. At most you can have certain places where a higher intensity of those values ​​come out. As a photographer I try not to make judgments, but to observe much more. I photograph places that I find fascinating."
If you look at the photos of Uncommon Places, you get the feeling of stepping into the diary of a large country that spends its summer months in sleep, with long, empty, sunny streets, a Coca-Cola shop, lost in time, perhaps a total happy country. “People were probably much happier at the time. Now the Americans are no longer happy. Now when people see my photos of Winslow, they find them very nostalgic. But then I explain to them that it just looked like this. It didn't look nostalgic at the time. And in all those years it has not changed at all. And that is not uncommon.”

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The Bechers

In contrast to many other photographers at that time, Shore did not indulge in a conceptual, repetitive approach to landscape. “I was a friend of Hilla Becher for many years. And in the 70s Hilla said: ‘I know what you should do. You should photograph every main street in America’. Then I said: ‘No Hilla, that's what you would do. I look for places that are most characteristic. If I am photographing all day long and exploring American culture, then the structural questions I ask myself will lead to a certain subject.’ So, if I am interested in how the space changes through perspective, then I cannot shoot a portrait. So, I choose my subjects that are a laboratory of the things I am researching. In this way I explored American culture. I looked for the visual laboratory where I could play with. Sometimes you play with flat structures. And sometimes you play with a big perspective. I'm thinking about relationships in space and how it comes onto the picture plane. That is how I also photographed ‘Sunset’. I came across that place and saw that it suited my formal investigation."

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I choose my subjects that are a laboratory of the things I am researching.

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Ansel Adams

You could see the urban landscapes of Shore as a reaction against the romantic landscapes of Ansel Adams. “When I was young, I had dinner with Ansel Adams, where he got drunk and said: I had a creative hot streak in the 40s and since then I've been pot boiling pot boiling.” However, Shore does not disapprove nature photography principally. In the 1980s, Shore went to live in Montana, where he intensively dedicated himself to nature. Instead of showing the greatness of the mountains, Shore tried to search the depth in simple, sometimes treeless landscapes. The photo ‘Brewster County, Texas, 1987’ originates from this period. “I've always been busy with the landscape. I will give you one example. We have a large, very beautiful garden at home. I photograph it very often. An average photographer would only take photos if everything is in bloom. But I am interested in what a garden looks like in all seasons. I photograph my garden as it develops during the course of the year. I appreciate all moments outside of bloom. You can also apply this to the landscape. It must be an Ansel Adam's landscape to be fascinated.”

Aesthetics

That raises the question of how Shore sees aesthetics in his photography. Is aesthetics a road to the content of the image or a means to make his viewers think about visual language? “I don't have the goal to confuse or shock people. I photograph something with a certain aesthetic because I find it fascinating. I also don't have a single theme that runs through my sixty years of career. What interests me first is viewing the world with less filter, less preconceived ways of visual perception, to experience a more direct way of the world. And secondly to convey what the world looks like in a state of heightened consciousness. If the subject is too dominant, then the experience of consciousness becomes secondary. In the project Uncommon Places there is a photo ‘Room 28 Holiday Inn, Alberta, August 18, 1974’ of a lamp in a motel room. You see a television behind a curtain. It is not a beautiful lamp by any means, it is not nostalgic, it was a modern lamp at the time, completely contemporary. The lamp was very ugly, but for me this photo has a liveliness. It becomes tangible. It feels like seeing the normal world with an increased consciousness. If it had been the world most beautiful lamp, the viewer would not have connected to that consciousness of looking, because then he would have appreciated only the lamp.”

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In the Stephen Shore’s landscapes, you see that he often omits the horizon from the image. Was this a conscious act in order to point the viewer at the space right in front of him? “It is a problem that has been present in my mind for years. Why is it that some photos have a convincing three-dimensional space? For years I have been looking for a certain perspective or using vertical lines along the edges to suggest the depth. Then I thought: if I now go to an open piece of land where there are no elements that can suggest depth like in a city, could I also suggest space? I needed the eighties to find this out."

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Meditation

It is known that Minor White let his students meditate before they went into nature to photograph. For Stephen Shore, is perception during photography a way of meditation? "Yes. As I travel, I try to get into a state of meditation to get a heightened state of perception. That is more important than just studying the subject. For some people, meditation is closing itself off from the world. They go to a special meditation room where they close their eyes and they become completely silent. I always wonder what happens when the telephone rings and mother calls. Then all that consciousness disappears in one fell swoop. You hear your mother's voice and your entire internal harmony is suddenly disturbed. I am interested in that state of consciousness in the middle of life. In the middle of a conversation and in the middle of walking on the street, shopping and taking photos."

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As I travel, I try to get into a state of meditation to get a heightened state of perception.

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Walker Evans

Shore is not just influenced by Walker Evans, he also felt deeply related to him, as if they have the same DNA. “When I was twelve years old, I already had a consciousness of composition. Of the forms within the frame. I see that awareness through all my work, even when I take photos that look very sloppy and fleeting. That's because I also investigate what that volatile looks like. Beaumont Newhall wrote the book The History of Photography and in the last chapter New Directions, he wrote about four recent trends: the documentary photograph (which refers to reality and says: I show it), the straight photography (the self-assured work of art) formalistic photograph (which the qualities of an image) and the equivalent (who sees the image as a metaphor). When I read that, I realized that the photos that meant the most to me, such as those by Walker Evans and Eugene Atget, already had the four elements. If you take a photo of Evans, it is a conscious work of art, by someone who knows the art world well, but it is also a document. And it also has a documentary style, but he also showed the culture behind his image. At the same time, the photos of Evans are formal explorations, investigations into how things get their place within a framework. Finally, you have the equivalent. I once heard Evans talk in 1972 during an exhibition of his work. The most important thing I remembered then was the term ‘transcendent document’, and the essence of what he said then was that he saw his work as equivalents, exactly the way Stieglitz used the term. Only he used much more complex subjects than a few clouds. When he spoke about the documentary style, he saw that he used a visual cultural reference to give meaning to his work. In fact, he was already a postmodernist. I felt that I did not learn this from him but that I shared this temperament with him. When I looked at his work, I understood that I looked at the world in the same way. And also, people like Minor White who took culturally neutral subjects, such as nature. By the way I don't think Whites most extraordinary photos are of nature, but of buildings in Portland. So, a transcending photo does not have to be of a rock."

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Colour or black and white

Paul Strand once said that you could not express higher emotions in colour, but Shore finds that to be sheer nonsense. Shore laughs loudly and says: “He once tried to give me advice, namely: don't use colour anymore! And then you have to remember that I had read about Wassily Kandinsky years before, explaining how he linked exactly higher emotions to colour! I thought by myself: this person is just talking nonsense.”

In a visual culture full of black and white photography, Shore, along with William Eggleston, became known for being one of the first to use colour. Why did he turn to colour photography in the 1970s? "It was a combination of things. At a party, I met a composer who asked if he could see my photos. Then I showed my black and white conceptual work. When I opened my box and he saw them, he said: ‘Oh, but that's all black and white!’ He only knew the popular photography of colour postcards. I then started to think about the difference between the common art photography that was exclusively in black and white and the vernacular photography in colour. Then I became interested in the banal use of photography. I wanted to investigate the cultural significance of the snapshot or the postcard and they were all in colour. So, my conclusion was that I also had to use colour. At that time, I made an exhibition about all kinds of daily use of photography. I did a series of snapshots with a camera called the Mick-a-Matic true, done with a plastic headed Mickey Mouse with a lens in his head and a flash on top. The Mick-a-Matic was a delightful snapshot camera. When I did portraits with it, people were always smiling, because they're looking at a big, plastic head of Mickey Mouse. I took this experience to American Surfaces. I wanted a camera that did not intimidate people.”

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The form only gets meaning in combination with the content.

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Music

Shore once compared the mastery of photography to that of a Chinese cook, making a distinction of the level of technology, formal mastery and psychological mastery. Can he explain how he got from the formal, compositional level to the psychological meaning of the image? “The psychological meaning of a photo is a combination of every factor in the image, so the content, but the meaning also comes from the formal decisions, from the structure of the photo. This aspect is most related to music. Most music does not have much content in the sense of a photo or a novel, but much of the psychological experience comes from the structure. This also applies to a photo." Shore pushes a tea glass to a sugar bowl and asks me to say stop when they are close enough. “I would say stop earlier because I see the objects from a different point of view. So, for us the distance is experienced in a different way. You respond to a certain space between the two objects, because of the way it clicks with you. This is often an unconscious psychological process. But the form only gets meaning in combination with the content."

Archaeology of the present ‍

One of the recent projects that Shore did was as an archaeologist in Israel. How did he get it? “I became very interested in archaeology in one way or another. I do not know why. So, I signed up to participate in excavations. Coincidentally, my college sponsored an excavation in Israel and I was able to go there.” You could say that metaphorically the entire work of Shore is a photographic archaeology of the present, digging in the surface of the visible world. “That was also part of the connection I had with the excavations, because that's how I see my photography. During my months of traveling through America I sometimes had days on which I was not inspired and then I said to myself: when I arrive at the next town and I imagine that I am an archaeologist who does not go to New Guinea, but to America. What would I photograph then? But I was also interested in the process in which the past appears again in the present. I have been photographing human traces of the present culture.“

Survivors in Ukraine

The last project that Shore did, and about which his book Survivors in Ukraine has been published, is about Holocaust survivors in Ukraine. Shore’s grandfather emigrated from Ukraine to the US in the nineteenth century. His wife, Ginger Shore, suggested to investigate in the lives of Jewish Holocaust survivors who still live in Ukraine. For this book Shore photographed landscapes but also took intimate portraits of the over thirty-five survivors. For Shore, it was the first time he embarked on a project with a strong emotional and personal content. How did that feel for him after years of formal research into the medium? “I made two trips there and I had the same experience on both trips. I felt that the emotion was in the air. And I still have to unravel where it comes from. Whether that it is my own personal history, whether that it is my knowledge of history, or that the history of the location has just left a trail that people can feel. But whatever it was, it was a very powerful experience. The problem for me was to take photos that were expressive without being manipulative. When you talk about the holocaust, the word alone has an extremely large load, it is an emotional rocket. So, I was looking for a way to take photos that were not emotional manipulation, but that were not so neutral that you could no longer feel it. When I finally saw the pictures in the book, they had this mentality of observation.”

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All images © Stephen Shore. Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York.

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Website: http://stephenshore.net

Instagram: stephen.shore

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Selected books

Stephen Shore: American Surfaces

Stephen Shore: Transparencies: Small Camera Works 1971-1979

Uncommon Places: The Complete Works

Stephen Shore: The Nature of Photographs

Stephen Shore: Survey

Stephen Shore: Survivors in Ukraine

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