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May 9, 2010
There is an interesting interview with Stephen Shore conducted by Gil Blank at AmericanSuburbX about his American Surfaces photodiary project in early 1970s.
In this project Shore melded photography's capacity for factuality to the detritus of Pop art and culture in the form of a snap shot aesthetic in an art context.
Stephen Shore, Pueblo Bonito New Mexico, American Surfaces, June 1972.
There is a matter-of-fact interpretation of American society as Shore finds it---television sets, TV dinners, Jesus, three logs bound with rope that oddly decorate a lobby, a red-velvet-piped throne toilet, the wishfully royal blues and golds of American motel coverlets.
In the interview Shore says:
I was interested in the snapshot, and in the natural quality that some few snapshots do contain...One of the thoughts behind the Conceptualist work was that there’s this world out there that we experience, and that making it into a photograph necessitates the mediation of an artist. Almost inevitably, visual conventions come into play, so that what I see in the photograph is tied as much to visual conventions as any opportunity to see the rest of the world...Although it’s important to say that it was not my intention to “be a machine.” If I can detect a difference between how I see things as I experience the world, and how I then see them in photographs, that difference interests me. Part of my intention with American Surfaces — and the entire terminology of “mediation” is something I’ve only begun to discuss in retrospect; at the time I don’t think I used that term — was simply to take pictures that looked natural to me, but that distinction is what I was after.
The Conceptualist art movement was about purposely deskilling approach to production with an intentionality to imitate “vernacular” photography: anonymous snapshots, newspaper photographs, accidental documents etc.
Stephen Shore, Granite Oklahoma, American Surfaces, July 1972
Shore adds that the inheritance of artistic conventions determine how we “should” see or structure the world. If I do away with those trappings, it doesn’t mean that there isn’t still something else beneath it that’s me seeing:
the phrases and thoughts in my mind were taking “natural pictures,” and making a “visual diary.”..I’d open a door, and there would be this bed. I’d get up in the morning and open the bathroom door, and there would be this toilet. I’d go to the diner and there would be this food on this surface, on this table....In photographic terms, if you remove as much of the photographic convention as possible, what you’re left with is yourself, and how you see.
So we have the idea of pictorial vocabularies. Shores idea of "natural" or "unmediated" photographs utilizes the pictorial vocabulary of the snapshot to break through photographic conventions.
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another interview with Stephen Shore in See Saw magazine by Aaron Schuman