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November 28, 2006
I do not know anything about this photographer who worked the streets of New York in the 1980s and took photographs of driveways, back lots, industrial buildings, houses sheathed in paper brick in the New York City area. At this stage I only know what I have read in an article in the New Yorker entitled 'Jerry Shore's New York, and ours' by Adam Gopnik.
Jerry Shore, New York,
That's a pretty vibrant bright red. It's made vibrant by the strong silent. Yet, though a part of pop culture, it is an anti-picturesque image made without pop irony.
Jerry Shore, New York,
Gopnik says:
Shore's photography is, to use the ever-reductive language of art criticism, an attempt to reconcile the subject matter of the New York school of black-and-white street photography of the fifties---the love of the overlooked, the stray, the strange, the gutter, and the slum---with the high finish and compositional poise of the Meyerowitz-Eggleston school of color photography. His own ambitions for his photographs seem to have been almost purely formal and even abstract: though he was always on the streets, he never saw himself as a documentary street photographer, in the familiar Eugene Richards sense. His attention was devoted to space and color and form. And, to be sure, it is the organization of the pictures that first strikes one---what was called, in formalism's rosier days, their interpenetrating planes and surprising deep space.
I reckon these images go beyond formalism--to a concern about place---to Shore's urban neighbhood which he loved.
Gopnik talks in terms of Shore's will to memorialize the commonplace mirrors our own sense of how things we love get lost, and can be recalled only in pictures.There are no people in these images.
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Effusive praise from Gopnik, and beautiful photos. But is there a show somewhere, a book?