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January 6, 2009
Stephen Shore's text, The Nature of Photographs, (1998, recently reprinted) can be seen as an extension of a class on photographic seeing he taught at Bard College. This used John Szarkowski's The Photographer's Eye as a central text.
Shore's text is a book about photographs rather than the act of photography and so it is about photographic seeing, the visual grammar of photography, and aesthetics(or the categories we use to interpret images). By photographs Shore means the straight (art) photograph taken with a camera and printed from a negative or a digital file, as opposed to composites and images created through Photoshop or computer generated imagery.
Stephen Shore, South of Klamath Falls, Oregon, from Uncommon Places
He says:
So how my pictures are seen now, as opposed to the early 70s, I see a tremendous difference. People say my pictures are nostalgic, my pictures aren’t nostalgic, they’re nostalgic! My pictures are just pictures. When they were shown in the early seventies in New York, there was no hint of nostalgia. Some people who didn’t get them said, well, it’s just like looking at the world, why would anyone want to show me this? There was no distance from it, now there’s a distance of time.
However, Shore works very much in the modernist tradition mapped by Szarkowski, as opposed to the poststructuralist or cultural studies perspective that places photos within language or the visual media scape.
It is the latter that would explore the way that pictures are time capsules showing subtle changes in how we interpret images. Shore, is more concerned with the photograph as photograph. In the introduction to the Photographer's EyeSzarkowski said:
This book is an investigation of what photographs look like, and of why they look that way. It is concerned with photographic style and with photographic tradition: with the sense of possibilities that a photographer today takes to his work...in large part the photographer was bereft of the old artistic traditions .... The photographer must find new ways to make his meaning clear.
Shore initially explores the nature of a photograph at the physical level. This level includes the chemical makeup of a print, the photographs flatness, the fact it has edges making it be contained in boundaries (unlike our own vision, which, when combined with the moving of the head, is infinite, compared to the finite view of a photograph, making the photograph seem limited), the texture, and the color (or lack of color) of the print. These are tools to create a meaning, evoke an emotion, and so on. This level is about in making an image using a camera. A photographer stands in front of a subject and makes several decisions: where to stand, what to include, how to utilize focus and finally, how to use time to record the image.
The second level of the nature of a photograph for Shore is explored in terms of how photography differs from any other discipline. This is explored in terms of a photographer analyzing existing reality and then choosing (by vantage point, frame, moment of time, and selecting focus) what he wants to create the structure of his photograph.
So the nature of photograph is about how a photographer can use technical tools to create meaning of a photograph. Nothing new there. So how do we read or interpret a photograph? In the last chapter 'Mental Modelling' Shore says:
Earlier I suggested that you become aware of the space between you and the page in this book. That caused an alteration of your mental model. You can add to this awareness by being mindful, right now, of yourself sitting in your chair, its back pressing against your spine. To this you can add an awareness of the sounds in your room. And all the while, as your awareness is shifting and your mental model is metamorphosing, you are reading this book, seeing these words – these words, which are only ink on paper, the ink depicting a series of funny little symbols whose meaning is conveyed on the mental level. And all the while, as your framework of understanding shifts, you continue to read and to contemplate the nature of photographs.
We are not at the level of language yet as we are still concerned with the photograph as an individual object, as so yet to cross the boundaries between photography and culture.
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Walker Evans' work came to define for Shore '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.