Ashland, 1973

In 1972, Shore drove from New York City to Amarillo, Texas making photographs that documented everything he did in a style that mirrored your average snapshot. It was an attempt to make art in the world that would reflect his own existence, yet maintain a discernable conceptual content. He was taking pictures Warhol might have made if he was riding shotgun with Robert Frank. The images covered a wide swath of all parts of America and its broad culture: while remaining art objects that intentionally looked like a snapshots even if they contained things no discerning tourist would bother to remember: toilets, TV dinners, unremarkable intersections, and random strangers. The work served its purposes well: it created a very detailed diary with no central character. The pictures become the diary of an invisible man: you know his whereabouts from the spaces he inhabits, the food he eats and the people who notice his existence, but he is never seen or heard. What makes the pictures sing is Shore’s breathtaking ability to create a world that seems so every day, but contains elements of transcendent beauty that obliterating anything undertaken by nature photographers like Ansel Adams or Elliot Porter. Shore creates a seamless image that makes the viewers feel they are the ones who noticed the light streaming through a telephone booth, the dance of telephone wires over a dusty street, the color of a turquoise pipe, the sky reflected in the hoods of parked cars, and generally how great our world can look if one takes some time...
The lack of a personal visual style might have been the result of the working through of visual problems, but in the end it allows those who like looking to feel that if given the chance they might be able to see the world as wondrously as Shore did. At the close of the Uncommon Places work, Shore returned to more conceptual territories, making images that de-constructed scale, perspective, and sequencing: he returned to making pictures about how the camera sees. At times these are interesting, but they are not nearly as fulfilling as the world we were lucky enough to see through his rather generous eye.
Image Credit: Stephen Shore : Second Street, Ashland, Wisconsin, July 9, 1973


http://www.skuawk.com/photography/959/the-landscape-of-stephen-shore-at-the-icp