ARTWORKER OF THE WEEK #23

Stephen Shore @ Sprueth Magers Lee, London, UK

Untitled (32a), 1972
C-print (10.2 x 15.2 cm)
Edition of 10

Additional images

Stephen Shore is one of America's most influential contemporary photographers. A long and distinguished career began at the precocious age of 14, when three of his works were bought by Edward Steichen, then curator of photography at MoMA. Shore went on to persuade Andy Warhol to let him document The Factory, an association which was to last several years. Still only 24, he had a solo show at New York's Metropolitan Museum -- a first for a living photographer. Shore's exhibition at Sprueth Magers Lee focuses on two series -- American Surfaces and Uncommon Places -- taken during a number of road trips across America in the '70s. Some of the works on view will be familiar to those who saw Tate Modern's seminal photographic survey show Cruel and Tender last year, although many have never before been published.

Stephen Shore is exhibiting at Sprueth Magers Lee until 20/01

The following conversation took place at Sprueth Magers Lee on the opening day of the exhibition.



Jennifer Thatcher: Tell me how this exhibition came about...

Stephen Shore: Well, I hadn't had a show in London for 30 years... I had a show at The Photographers' Gallery in the beginning of the '70s: a series of black-and-white photographs of conceptually based sequences. Nothing since that period. And Simon (Lee) was starting up his gallery, knew of my work and that I'd be coming to London for Cruel and Tender (at Tate Modern), and suggested we get together. That's how this came about.

JT: Although the work in this exhibition is rooted in the '70s, if I didn't know that, I would say that it looks not exactly timeless, but certainly contemporary. How do you feel looking at these photographs now? Do they still seem current to you?

SS: Yes they do. I mean my own work has moved on to other things since... but it's more for you to say that than for me. Or for critics or gallerists to say that...

JT: Why do you think that the aesthetic you use is still current nowadays? In the era of video art and new technology why photography still seems relevant -- perhaps even more so -- now?

SS: There are a couple of things that people find compelling about it. One is that, although we know that the photograph is a distortion of the world, because it's a selection from the world it has a fictive quality. Nonetheless, there's a one-to-one relationship with the photograph, a specific segment of the world at a specific moment, that a painting doesn't have, and I think it means something different. For example, if you see a Rembrandt painting of an Arab, you know that it's really his neighbour wearing a turban that was sitting in front of him when he was painting. Nonetheless the painting can be effective. But if you see a photograph of a Westerner wearing a turban -- and I'm thinking of a turn-of-the-last-century American photographer named Fred Holland Day who would sometimes dress up as Jesus and photograph himself -- you know there's something hokey going on because you know it's some guy wearing a costume in front of the camera. There's this absolute one-to-one relationship, again given the limitations of photography. I'm not saying that it's presenting the whole truth -- but within the confines of its own truncation of reality, there's this one-to-one relationship that doesn't exist in the painting, so the experience is different. The other aspect of photography is its ubiquity in our culture: in advertising, in postcards, in snapshots, and it carries all kinds of cultural references in magazines, in newspapers, and so that gives material for an artist to use.

JT I'm interested in what you say about staging photography. There's a sense that this technique has been used a lot more since you made these works in the '70s -- perhaps by people who have been influenced by you, like Gregory Crewdson. How much would you say the works in this show are documentary and how much conscious staging was involved?

SS: Well, this gets back to what I was saying before about the truncation of reality in the photograph. There's something arbitrary about taking a picture. So I can stand at the edge of a highway and take one step forward and it can be a natural landscape untouched by man and I can take one step back and include a guardrail and change the meaning of the picture radically. It's so arbitrary that decision -- arbitrary may be the wrong word -- it's so in my control as a photographer to so -- almost 180 degrees -- alter the meaning of the photograph by taking one step. I can take a picture of a person at one moment and make them look contemplative and photograph them two seconds later and make them look frivolous. As someone's talking, they go through many different facial expressions. The photograph doesn't record the flow of time, it's taking 1/125th second out of the flow of time, and so I can stop a facial expression to have one meaning or have another meaning. I don't see a huge jump from that to staging a picture. I don't feel that there's a line that’s crossed. I don't in fact stage my photographs terribly, but if I see my car's in the picture and I need to move it for formal reasons, like I want to create a little more spatial tension, and want to move the car three feet over, I have no problem doing that. Or if the corner of a picture needs some visual element to give it more texture or aliveness, I might take a handful of pebbles and throw it there to do that. I have no qualms about staging. I don't stage in the way that Philip-Lorca di Corcia and Greg Crewdson do, but I don't see a particular line's crossed in what they do.

JT: You talk about truncating reality and in these images there's a definite mood presented -- of desolation, loneliness, perhaps? There are very few people in these photographs and also a great deal of poverty. Did that reflect your state of mind at the time -- or what were you interested in showing?

SS: Well, I was interested in showing the built culture of North America, more than merely looking at poverty. There are pictures of some things that are run-down but there are other pictures of new construction, tract houses -- maybe not in this show but in other work I've done. So I was interested in a range of the culture. I think the question of loneliness was not something I was consciously trying to put in the pictures, but...

JT: Perhaps you can describe your travelling experience...

SS: I was alone. And I liked travelling in a car for hours and discovering things. And I found that after several days of travelling, seeing the road continually in front of me, that I got myself in a particular state of mind. So, I think I was feeling more alone than lonely.

JT: You're right to say that the photographs reflect a range of the culture. I didn't mean to imply that you were focusing only on poverty. In fact, there's an element of -- what in Britain, at least -- you could call middle-class aspiration in the images: the swimming pool, the photograph of Roger Moore... What were your aspirations at the time? I mean, this work seems incredibly mature for a twenty-something-year-old. Why were you drawn to that level of society?

SS: I was interested in the complexity of the culture, not just poverty, as I don’t see the pictures as being tremendously political. I wasn't taking a stand. I saw the situation as being more complex. It would have been too easy to sneer at the culture -- there were more levels to it than that.

JT: You had a solo exhibition at the Kunsthalle Duesseldorf in '77. What was your experience of going to Europe at that time and meeting your contemporaries?

SS: Oh, I didn't actually go to the exhibition!

JT: How much, then, were you aware of developments in Europe and, in fact, your own influence on these photographers?

SS: I was a friend of Hilla Becher's since the early '70s. She was spending a lot of time in New York -- her son was going to school in New York. I guess we met in 1973. The Bechers were collecting my work and I was -- and still am -- a tremendous fan of their work. I wasn't aware of their students till much later. So I would say that I wasn't aware of the influence that show in Dusseldorf may have had on their students. Bernd didn't travel as much and I didn't meet him really until the '90s, but Hilla and I have known each other for a long time.

JT: Did that friendship influence your decision to use architecture in your photographs? You're both interested in photographing buildings on the verge of becoming obsolete; although the Bechers' interest was more in industrial buildings, whereas, in the images in this show at least, your interest seems to be more in buildings used for entertainment or leisure purposes that were becoming run-down, that perhaps people couldn't afford any more. The drive-in theatres, the barber shop, etc.

SS: I don't think that my decision to photograph architecture was really influenced by them. Before I met Hilla, I was aware of their work. But I'm sure it had some influence on my work, as I think the work of Ed Ruscha did. I think that a more specific influence on my work was Walker Evans, who was also dealing with architecture. A neighbour gave me a copy of American Photographs, his first book, for my 11th birthday. The first photography book I ever owned was Walker Evans: a long-standing and ingrained influence. So that's where my interest in photographing architecture came from. But honed in some ways by Ruscha and the Bechers. There was an interesting book published last year (2002) -- Festschrift -- for the Bechers by Schirmer (Schirmer/Mosel). I did a conversation (for the book) and talked about some of the differences between Ruscha and the Bechers and also my work. One story I remember is Hilla once said, looking at my pictures of main streets, that what should I do is take hundreds and hundreds of pictures of main streets, and then I realised, no, that's not what I wanted to do. I wanted to find that quintessential main street. And I realised the difference between our approach at that point. In the late '60s and early '70s I was very interested in photographing from conceptual programme. But at this point now, in '73 or '74, I realised that I wasn't interested in that kind of programmatic approach any more.

JT: How accurate do you find the description "cruel and tender" (the title of the Tate Modern group show) with reference to your work? Your work doesn't strike me as being cruel; it doesn't have that level of detachment...

SS: It might be cruel in a different way. It might not be cruel in a mean way but in a sense of the harsh light of reality. It's like you have a friend whom you see -- maybe even love -- and they look a certain way to you, and one day you look at them and you think: I never really looked at them before. The other levels in them had taken over their mere physiognomy. The photograph -- the camera -- doesn't see those other levels and so it presents an optical reality, a truncated reality. Because it's different from the world -- it doesn't flow in time, it's flat, it has edges -- it describes the features in a way that isn't clouded by sentiment. I think that's where the cruel aspect comes in.

JT: As a final question, can you tell me what you're working on now?

SS: I have two projects. I don't know if you saw Tate magazine in the spring. I had a portfolio of New York street pictures -- taken with a 8 x 10 camera. I made large inkjet prints. So, I've been photographing on the street in New York. And the other project I'm doing is using an Apple application called iPhoto, where you can order individually printed books using print on demand technology. Anyone using an Apple computer can take digital photographs, sequence them by clicking and dragging the images, and pressing a button that says "order book", and four days later Federal Express -- or whoever -- delivers this cloth-bound book to you. And I thought that this had just such incredible potential for artists' books, and so the last show I had in New York this fall I included a table where I had 17 of these books that I've been doing. These were all done in the past half-year. This has been my main project: making thousands of these books!



Image © the artist, courtesy Sprueth Magers Lee

© 2003 KultureFlash Limited