all photos ~ (embiggenable)
I WAS SEARCHING FOR A SPECIFIC STEPHEN SHORE QUOTE. Didn’t find it. However, in my search I came across this (an excerpt), written by Christy Lange, from a section-Nothing Overlooked-in the book STEPHEN SHORE:
“This was a new conception of the landscape picture….Each image is so sharp and detailed that it seems to have infinite centers of attention, or none at all. ‘If I saw something interesting, I didn’t have to make a picture about it. I could let it be somewhere in the picture, and have something else happening as well. So this changes the function of the picture-it’s not like pointing at something and saying, “Take a look at this”. It’s saying, “Take a look at this object I am making”. It’s asking you to not savor something in the world, but savor the image itself .”….Shore saw how the photograph ‘imposes order on the scene’ or ‘simplifies the jumble by giving it structure’.”
At the risk of sounding self-aggrandizing, this description of one of Shore’s pictures, Beverly Boulevard and La Brea Avenue, could easily have been written about most of my photographs inasmuch as, as mentioned in my last entry, I rarely make pictures that ask a viewer to “take a look at this”-aka: the literally depicted referent(s). Rather, I ask viewers to “take a look at this object I am making”-aka: the print in and of itself and the form depicted there upon.
Ya know, like in this entry’s pictures; for instance, I am not asking any one to “savor” the, as the wife calls it, clutter in a corner of my work room. Rather, my hope is that a viewer might “savor”, or at least appreciate / recognize, the form (Shore’s “structure”) I have attempted to illustrate as depicted on the surface of a print.
That is to write that I do not see so-called traditional beauty in the quotidian world around me but that I do believe that I make “beautiful”, visually interesting photographs thereof.