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A Conversation with Stephen Shore

June 9th, 2008

The books that are referenced in the interview (top row, from the left):
Stephen Shore (part of the contemporary artists monograph series), Phaidon, 2008. $39.95
Stephen Shore: A Road Trip Journal (early design and next to that, the current cover design), Phaidon, 2008. $250.00
(second row, from the left):
The Nature of Photographs (2nd edition), Phaidon, 2006. $39.95
Uncommon Places, 50 Unpublished Photographs, 1973-1978, Walter Conrads/Kamel Mennour, Dusseldorf/Paris, 2002. Out-of-Print
Uncommon Places: The Complete Works, Aperture, 2004. $50.00
(bottom row, from the left):
American Surfaces, Phaidon, 2005. Possibly out-of-print. Retailed at $55.00
Uncommon Places, Aperture, 1982. Out-of-Print

STEPHEN SHORE, A Conversation with Darius Himes
April 10, 2008, New York City

THE INTRODUCTION
I have been placed in an unfair position. Stephen Shore is a photographer that deservedly enjoys a place of some stature in the history of photography. At the age of 14, three of his photographs were acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and in 1971 he gained the distinction of being the second (the first had been Alfred Stieglitz) living photographer to have a one-person show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In subsequent years he has exhibited widely, notably being included in The New Topographics exhibition of 1975 (curated by William Jenkins) at the George Eastman House, and seen numerous volumes of his work published to critical acclaim. What this means is that much has been written about him. In fact, I dare say that all of the good sentences have already been taken.

I cannot pretend to advance any new critical stance in regards to Stephen Shore’s work. I cannot even pretend to say that I have followed his career from the beginning. Heck, when he made the road trip across America which forms the foundation of A Road Trip Journal, which is being published by Phaidon this summer, I had just turned 3.

What I can admit to, however, is a deeply-felt sense of docility, of being a student in relation to Shore’s ideas and working methods and his obvious and chronicled influence upon an entire generation of photographers, both here in the US and in Europe, (particularly the students of Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunsthalle Akademie in Dusseldorf).

Shore is known to be an admired and loved teacher. He has been the director of the photography program at Bard College for over 25 years. In 1998 he published The Nature of Photographs, a foundation-building textbook developed over the years for beginning students in photography. It is the type of book that one returns to without hesitation, assured that a quick reading will offer up, once again, new insights. The Nature of Photographs was initially published by Johns Hopkins University Press, but was reissued by Phaidon in 2006. Now, Phaidon has just released two more books on Shore: a wonderfully engaging survey book as part of their contemporary (and affordable at $39.95) artists monograph series and A Road Trip Journal which revisits Shore’s famous road trip of 35 years ago (much less affordable at $250.00).

The work featured in A Road Trip Journal was made in the summer of 1973 and acts as the bridge between his body of work known as American Surfaces (made in 1972) and the work that came to be known as Uncommon Places, made between 1973 and 1978 and published by Aperture (as their first book of color photographs) in 1982. A Road Trip Journal contains, at its heart and in their entirety, two intricately woven bodies of archival material.

The first half of the book reproduces in facsimile the journal itself, a work in which the 26 year-old Shore, a born and bred New Yorker who had only just learned how to drive two years prior, recorded his exploration and observation of America from the road: the mileage, what he ate, where he stayed, what he watched on TV and every exposure he made with his new 4×5 camera all itemized in his own handwriting alongside pasted-in postcards, memorabilia, hotel, restaurant, gas station and hotel receipts and a few of his own photographs. There is nothing personal or diaristic about the journal and was consciously laid out in an organized, deliberate fashion.

The second half is comprised of the photographs themselves, which Shore made between July 4, 1973 and August 22 of that same year. It is important to note that every single exposure is reproduced in the plate section of the book, in elegant combinations of one, two, three or four images per page and various combinations thereof among the page spreads.

A Road Trip Journal, then, is a complete record of the artist’s outward activities recorded in meticulous detail by his own hand. In mid-April I had the chance to speak with Shore about revisiting this work 35 years after it’s creation. Excerpts from the conversation follow.
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“The very age and body of the time, his form and pressure.”
–Hamlet, Willliam Shakespeare

…You must cultivate attention–the art of seeing, the art of listening. You needn’t trouble about memory, that will take care of itself; but you must learn to live in the true sense. To pay attention is to live, and to live is to pay attention…”
–Louis Sullivan’s Kindergarten Chats

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THE CONVERSATION

DH The American highway is a mythical motif, not just in photography, but in American literature and popular culture. In your brief text for the book you talk about films and songs that you heard growing up and which contained “a magical litany of place names” including St Louis and Joplin, Missouri, Oklahoma City, Amarillo, Gallup, Flagstaff, Winona, Kingman, Barstow, and San Bernardino. These are all rather secondary American midwestern and western cities, and yet they were places that you wanted to experience firsthand. Was the idea of a journey strictly an outward movement for you? This is work made 35 years ago; looking back now, looking through every single exposure, do you see any inward movement accompanying this freedom you found on the road, as a young artist?

SS I’m not sure it was a metaphor for me. I think I played the role of an explorer. As I recall, it was that trip where…there used to be a store in NY called Abercrombie and Fitch [Abercrombie and Kent], which was not the yuppie clothing store it is today. It was on Madison Ave and it was a safari outfitter. If you were going on a big game safari you would go for your clothes and your rifles …

DH …the huge trunks…

SS Yes. I went to Abercrombie and Fitch and got safari gear to wear because I thought I would dress the part of the explorer. You know, a bush jacket, etc. I saw myself as an explorer.

It was meant to be an external journey. And I would say I was more in love with driving and the road than thinking about Evans and Frank. I may have been attracted by the same things they were attracted by. And maybe I was attracted to the same things that anyone who gets in a car and spends a couple of months driving are attracted by. There is a state of mind you get into after driving for a few days. It was the pleasure of it and the sense of exploration and also it was maybe coming from my background in New York, where until two years before, I didn’t even have a drivers license. There was a sense of freedom I had that I could get into a car and just go. I think that for my friends in Texas, who grew up in a car culture, it wasn’t such a big revelation for them. But for me, coming from New York, it was a great experience. I could just save up and get in the car and tomorrow be 800 miles in some other direction.

DH Initially, what was the role of the journal? It’s obviously not diaristic.

SS It was meant as an artwork. The year before I had kept a photographic diary, which became American Surfaces. When I switched to 4×5, my original intention was to continue American Surfaces, but with a larger camera. My first view camera was a crown graphic which is a hand held 4×5. And when I switched over I found that I loved using it on a tripod, which I wasn’t expecting, and I loved using a ground glass, which I also wasn’t expecting. I gave up the idea of continuing American Surfaces. The whole nature of my exploration changed.When it became clearer that I wasn’t going to be doing a visual diary, I wanted to have some other kind of journal. As I drove around I gathered postcards and I gathered all these other pieces of paper. Even prior to that, in New York, I was a collector of printed matter. Every piece of printed matter that would come to me–every form letter, I would save and then send out to people. I would send out collections. I wasn’t interested in preserving them forever, but I was interested in preserving them as cultural artifacts.

DH The plate section of A Road Trip Journal contains every single photograph you made on that trip, correct?

SS Yes. It has every exposure.

DH Every sheet of film exposed, including double exposures, etc.?

SS Yes. I did take some 35 mm, actually even some 2 1/4, but in terms of the 4 x 5 work, this is absolutely everything. And so there will not be another iteration, yet the more complete work. This is it.

DH I’d like to talk to you a little bit about your working method, particularly since you’ve included absolutely every exposure. There are a few exposures in here where it looks like the exact same shot, but I’m assuming you’re either bracketing or …

SS I don’t bracket. If I’ve done it again, there is a difference. There’s one place where I’m simply testing two different types of film.

DH For instance, there is one in particular that stands out in my mind, just a toilet in a hotel room…

SS With the toilet, they’re different. One is flushing and the other is not flushing. I wouldn’t take two of the same. I never bracket or take two of the same. In the back, somewhere here, there’s a picture of a window. [searching for the page spread] Ok, here it is. [p. 269, Window, Home of Mr + Mrs Wm Spring, Big Sur, Cal. July 24, 1973 2/5, 3/5] I wasn’t really interested in the window in this images. I was actually testing two different films. One was a short, type S and the other was a type L. And that’s all it was. I was staying in the house and I went outside and aimed it at something and took a couple pictures. We even had discussions at phaidon about whether a film test should be included because I wasn’t even interested in content. But we decided to keep it all in there.

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HEROIC ARTICULATION OF THE REAL

DH Gerry Badger has described your work as an “heroic articulation of the real.” Which to me carries connotations of the work as a support for contemplation. What do you think he means by this?

SS For me it has to do with the view camera. In the original Uncommon Places, there’s a picture of Eason, PA, with a red and white Volkswagen van in it.

I made that photograph on the first day that I used the 8×10; all the work in A Road Trip Journal is made with a 4×5 and then I took one short trip in ‘74 with the 4×5 before borrowing a friends’ 8×10. As you’re looking at the photograph, you realize that there is a boy sitting in the window and that you can even see his breath on the glass. It was this photograph that made me realize that with this camera I don’t have to walk across the street and photograph him. I can let him be a tiny little thing to be discovered in the picture. This was a very different technical approach from American Surfaces, for instance. So that changes the relationship of the viewer to the picture and the function of the picture. It’s not just a window directing your attention–”here look at this”— but is something itself to be the object of attention and to be explored. I think that’s similar to what Badger is saying.

DH This is also from Christy Lange’s essay, “It’s not like pointing at something and saying take a look this, it’s saying take a look at this object that I’m making. It’s asking you to savor not something in the world but to savor the image itself.”

SS Yes, exactly.

DH The one element that is a continuation from American Surfaces is what seems to be an interest in the incidentals of american popular cultural: what you ate and the places you slept. Being in this observer / explorer mode is also a constant with American Surfaces, but obviously with the 4×5, everything slows down. You can’t pull out a view camera the same way you can with a 35 mm.

SS Exactly. So when I photographed the pancakes in 4×5, I had been there, to that same restaurant [Trail’s End Restaurant, Kanab, Utah] the following year for the American Surfaces project. In fact there is a picture on the wall of that restaurant that I photographed the previous year. It’s a very different thing to have the food in front of you and take a picture with a 35mm, just like that. With a 4×5 I was standing on a chair and the camera is over here and the food is cold by the time I take the picture.

DH That all makes sense. The one element that is a continuation from American Surfaces is what seems to be an interest in the incidentals of American popular cultural: what you ate and the places you slept. Being in this observer / explorer mode is also a constant with American Surfaces, but obviously with the 4×5, everything slows down. You can’t pull out a view camera the same way you can with a 35 mm.

SS Exactly. So when I photographed the pancakes in 4×5, I had been there, to that same restaurant [Trail’s End Restaurant, Kanab, Utah] the following year for the American Surfaces project. In fact there is a picture on the wall of that restaurant that I photographed the previous year. It’s a very different thing to have the food in front of you and take a picture with a 35mm, just like that. With a 4×5 I was standing on a chair and the camera is over here and the food is cold by the time I take the picture.

DH What was the reaction of the restaurant owners? And by extension what was the reaction of most Americans you encountered? Hadn’t they even noticed you and your 35mm?

SS I think with a larger camera you get easier access.

DH Because you’re less threatening?

SS Yes. I mean I was a kid with long hair and this was 1973. Using my 35mm the previous year, there were occasions where cops would come and talk to me. I’d be shooting in some residential neighborhood and a cruiser would come out. Someone had looked out of their window and seen a kid with long hair and wondered, what was he doing here?

DH And it’s not like you could run away with a view camera. There is a certain level of seriousness that you convey.

SS Yes. At the restaurants, I would ask permission. I would have the camera with me and they would see it there and say that it was fine.

DH How would you talk about the project with people?

SS I don’t exactly remember, but I know I had a tendency to make it as straightforward as possible. I wouldn’t talk about art, but I would say, “I’m making a document of American food” or something along those lines. By contrast, when I was taking the street pictures of New York years later, I would be standing on 82nd and Broadway with an 8×10 camera and no one cared. People would walk around me. I’m standing there with an 8×10 camera and no one ever said a word to me. No one ever said, “Don’t take my picture.” People obviously saw me, but I was more anonymous and had more access to them then if I had a 35mm.

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CULTIVATION OF THE SENSES

DH There is a whole body of work–the Montana work–that is totally outside the purview of this interview for Bookforum, but I love your discussion with Michael Fried (in the Phaidon contemporary artists monograph paperback) about the opening up of the sense in viewing a photograph. You talk about that in The Nature of Photographs as well. It was fascinating hearing Fried approach it from an art historical place.

SS I agree with you. It was one of the most fascinating parts of that interview. What he’s saying, he has his own term for it. But this is what he tries to bring about with students, in looking at Cezanne.

DH You have talked about the need to cultivate an awareness of the senses and particularly the way we see and read two-dimensional surfaces. When did that become a conscious element for you? Was it the switch to the view camera and how deliberate it makes you act and make choices?

SS Yes. I would say it was brewing in me at the time of American Surfaces, but I didn’t practice it the same way. For me, the view camera is the technical means in photography of conveying a heightened state of awareness. So it was having the right tool.

DH Yes. Having the appropriate tool. During my undergraduate studies in photography, I remember bringing in some still-lifes that I had made with a 35mm and one of my professors (Eric Kronengold) looked at me and said, “Why aren’t you using a bigger camera? That stuffs not going anywhere.” He was trying to marrying the concept with the right technical expression. You seem to have found the right technical means for that idea of close attentiveness.

SS Very much so.

DH You quote an old Arab saying in the new paperback, “The apparent is a bridge to the real.” What do you take from that passage?

SS It means that as a photographer I can only deal with the external manifestations of things. That these are the external manifestations of forces that are below the surface and a photograph can maybe hint at that.

DH Where did the Essex County project fit, chronologically, into your work. Was it the late 90s?

SS Early 1990s.

DH On the heels of the Montana work?

SS Well, in 1990 I did some pictures in Mexico, in the Yucatan, and when I finished that project I realized that for the previous 20 years I had only worked in color and so I decided to do something different. And I decided that for the decade of the ‘90s I would only work in black-and-white. And so I did. It was also around the time that Iris printing began and I was interested in presenting sort of a “new object” that didn’t look like a photograph, but was photographic, that had more physical presence. Going back to this idea of making a photograph that is itself an object. This has more object presence than traditional photograph, because of the paper.

DH So you began making Iris prints in black-and-white?

SS Yes. Also, at this time, my life changed. At that point I had a young son, I had a job, I couldn’t get into a car and drive for three months. I wouldn’t want to be away for that long and so I did something different, which is that I photographed something that was in my immediate vicinity. I had a cabin in the Adirondacks in Essex County and I would get up early in the morning and go out into the woods and photograph the rocks and trees. There were also some ideas I was working on in the landscape in the 80s; some of the stuff that I touch on at the end of The Nature of Photographs that I wanted to explore further. This gave me a vehicle to do it.

DH What are some of those ideas?

SS What I would call the mental image. And finer control.

DH In your work, there is a tension between feeling both directed and simultaneously unguided. The framing, what you are choosing to point the camera at, the amount of detail that is being offered, the depth of field; all of that feels very deliberate. It opens up a discussion about the subtlety of how the audience is being directed by you.

SS Yes.

DH On a certain level I want to know what you want me to think about this scene, or this town, or this plate of food. But this may simply be an expectation on the part of us as viewers. I actually even catch hints of this in Christy’s essay, where she has used an adjective to describe something in your image which gives it a spin in either positively or negatively, as though you were being ironic in photographing that. We almost always want to pin a judgement to something. It must be conscious for you, wanting to avoid that.

SS Yes. I’ll go even further. People often talk about my work in relation to, or in some way as an out growth of Robert Frank and I would say that …

DH …only in the sense that you both got in cars and headed West.

SS Yes. Definitely not on visual terms. In terms of exactly what you’re talking about, I would say that my work at that time was a reaction to Frank. To my temperament his work is too pointed, too directed, in just the way you’re talking about. If his work was present in my mind at all on the trip, it was that I wanted to go in a different direction.

DH It makes me then think about the phrase from Winogrand, about wanting to see what things look like photographed. The ability to withhold judgement for such an extended period of time is difficult. Roland Barthes talks about the photograph’s “arrest of interpretation.” On one level we know that you, as the artist, are making hundreds of minor decisions all along the way in creating a picture–where you stand, what you include and exclude, what photographic process you’re employing, etc. And yet, with your work, it doesn’t feel like you’re interpreting what’s in front of you. You’re simply portraying and mirroring it to us; you’re observing, but not interpreting. Is that correct? Why do you think that is so important in your work?

SS First let me say that there may be a difference between “withholding judgement” and an “arrest of interpretation.” There may be interpretation without judgement, even though everyone knows that an artist can’t be fully objective, and that my framework of understanding governs what I find and therefore what I show you. But even accepting that, there’s a difference in emphasis with a judgement. I think it has to do with a couple things. One, as I said, is temperament. When I see people being judgmental, I often back off. The other thing is that most judgements dismiss the complexities of reality. At least to my eyes. But I’m also deeply interested in showing something of our time. So that it’s not just aiming a camera at the world; there is an interpretation. I’m looking at things and thinking. There is a quote from Hamlet that, as the decade progressed, took on more and more significance for me. It’s from the acting lesson that Hamlet gives. He states that one of the purposes of acting is to show the “very age and body of the time his form and pressure.” I would just say that over and over again. What does this mean? To show the very age and body of the time, his form and pressure.” And I kept coming up with pictures like… [searching for a picture]

DH It sounds like letting the “reality” be apparent, that “the apparent is a bridge to the real.” And the real is very complex as is.

SS Here, let me put it in a slightly different context. Here, look at that.

[Beverly Boulevard and La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, California, June 21, 1975, from the series, Uncommon Places]
So I took this picture, and after I took it … I guess this goes to interpretation and structure and the “form of our time.” I realized that I was structuring this in a very classical way, with one-point perspective, with things that are setting up the frame and setting up the foreground and I had fun doing it. I was going through a period of seeing how densely I could structure a picture and how far back into the picture I could look and how much I could set up all of this complex picture structure. At the same time I’m thinking, show “the very age and body of the time, his form and pressure.” Is this it? Or is this a structural understanding that I’m bringing to it that isn’t inherent in the scene? I went back to the same intersection the next day and took this picture, which is looking this way towards the other part of this intersection.

[Beverly Blvd and La Brea Ave, Los Angeles California, June 22, 1975 from Uncommon Places 50 Unpublished Photographs 1973-1978]

DH It’s a completely different picture; hardly even recognizable as the same intersection.

SS And it feels more like the photographer is hardly doing anything.

DH The one feels like a very complex structure and this other feels less so. More like a casual snapshot. Do you feel like this shows the form and pressure of the time?

SS I do. At least that was the direction my thinking went for the next year or so.

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ABOUT THE BOOK(S)

DH Uncommon Places was initially published in 1982 by Aperture and contained 40 color photographs made on several road trips between 1973 and 1978 using first, in 1973 a 4×5 view camera and then subsequently with an 8×10 view camera. You then revisited the entire project in 2002 with your two European dealers, publishing a book of out-takes (Stephen Shore, Uncommon Places, 50 Unpublished Photographs 1973-1978, published by Walter Conrads/Kamel Mennour, Dusseldorf/Paris, 2002). And then yet one more time, in 2004 the work was published by Aperture under the rubric The Complete Works, which wasn’t actually “the complete works.” How did the first book come about, and who edited it?

SS It was me and Carol Kismarick. It was the first color book that Aperture ever did and it was expensive for them. You know, one of the reasons I like working with phaidon is that they think, “How big can we make it?” Whereas other publishers think, “Where can we cut to make it possible? And you know, when we started talking about American Surfaces (Phaidon, 2005) and I brought out a stack like this [holds hands 6 inches apart], the editor’s reaction was, “well, let’s use them all!”

DH What was the genesis of the 2004 Aperture edition? How did it get a title that wasn’t really what it was?

SS At some point during production that title started bothering me. They had suggested it and I tried to call it back…

DH Sounds like its “the more complete works, but it’s not “the complete works!”

SS I don’t know why I let it go. I heard it. I said “Yes. Fine.” And then, I started thinking, well it’s not complete, and I wanted to call it back, and they said no, they’d already done publicity on it with that title. But they let me put in the statement about it really being a “director’s cut.”

DH What is your deepest hope now in bringing the journal and this first chapter, if you will, of Uncommon Places back out into the public attention?

SS Well, the journal itself I love as an object. It’s hard for me to be objective because it’s also very personal, even though [laughing] there’s nothing personal about it! As for the inclusion of all the pictures, it just kept growing as an idea. It’s a little weird showing all your pictures.

DH It’s like a book of contact sheets…

SS It would be like Bookforum having access to your hard drive with all your erasures. But on the other hand because it was my method of working and that I didn’t do two of anything, there are a lot of interesting pictures, I think.

DH The rigor of limiting yourself to one exposure makes for a very tight and discreet body of work. Once you decided to include everything, were there certain images where you were like, “Oh no! Do we have to include everything?

SS Yes. Of course! I’m a little concerned that it’s self-indulgent; I don’t know if people will be interested in seeing all my pictures. But I know that when I see other people’s contact sheets, I find it highly illuminating. In fact, there is a great book by Walker Evans in the Library of Congress where every 8×10 that he shot that is in the Library’s collection was published. As a photographer, that is fascinating.

DH I agree. There was the television show in the early 80s, directed by William Klein called Contacts where he looks at the tradition of photography and photojournalism through photographers’ contact sheets. Its definitely interesting in the photography community and for other photographers. How has the idea of the journal morphed for you over the years?

SS Now, I’ve been doing these self-published little iPhoto books. They are very diaristic often and I do them all the time.

DH I’ve read that you will do a book each time there is a six column, banner front page headline in The New York Times.

SS Yes. There’s only been one this last year. The last one was March 13th when Spitzer resigned and the one before that was last April when there was the shooting at the Virginia Tech campus. And that’s been it over the last 12 months. But I did probably 3 or 4 last week alone.

DH Which software are you using?

SS iPhoto. The whole Apple publishing is really very diaristic for me. For all that I said about my love of the 8×10, basically what I’m using for the past 3 years or so is a Canon Powershot.

DH Oh really. Have you put the 8×10 away?

SS Yeah. Pretty much.

DH It’s a lot of work getting that thing out.

[Click here to see a large selection of Stephen Shore's work, courtesy Bill Charles Represents]

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