Though (unfortunately) not of his recent lecture, but interesting none the less, here is a short clip of Stephen Shore discussing one of the images from his first Irish exhibition as the show was being installed. My own thoughts follow.
It often seems that to photograph America (on whatever scale) is at heart a literary endeavour, mapping everyday landscapes onto already established (and available) narrative structures, revealing in them some undiscovered truth – there’s the austerity of Walker Evans or Robert Frank and his melancholy romanticism, for example. It comes as no surprise either that we think of these photographers for the most part in terms of the books they have made. Stephen Shore’s interest in the over-looked reality of America’s everyday life belongs in this category also, but there is something else at work here, an undercurrent of conceptual rigour that belies the seemingly familiar places he has chosen to photograph. Shore’s scrutiny of the mundane, in which he found such unexpected depth, would be a revelation and a burden for photography in the years that followed.
The recent exhibition of his work at the Douglas Hyde Gallery in Dublin was an extremely welcome event, a chance to see some of the iconic pictures that have so fundamentally altered how we think about photography. But however strong the work (and that goes without saying in almost every case) there were some problems with this show (though apparently selected by the artist) that cumulatively served to undermine its effect. Shore is a photographer who has worked so consistently in series that to jumble together photographs from different periods and projects makes little sense. Of course this is, nominally, a retrospective but the layout suggests no real continuity or development between successive works, even though it certainly exists. What should be steady working through of pictorial concerns unique to the medium seem instead like strained leaps between otherwise far-flung points. It’s the less explored pathways of his work, especially the “street” pictures and the featureless landscapes that suffer most.
In many ways Shore has been a photographer damned by his own achievements, with the monolithic reputation of Uncommon Places and the host of imitators it has spawned. The acuity of his best work is such that not even Shore himself could live up to or even surpass it. Some exact emotional geometry of life at that particular moment is there in these photographs and few other photographers have ever so completely understood the complex kind of attention that only photography can bring to the world around us. He uses sophisticated compositional strategies that at first seem incidental, but inevitably hinge on some telling detail, like the best short fiction perhaps. So while this exhibition may have been a very useful introduction to this work it was a frustrating experience to view it with a degree of familiarity. Not a failure, by conceivable any means, but something of a disappointment given that artists of Shore’s reputation are shown so rarely in this country something deeper is expected when eventually they do, just to show us what we’ve been missing.
