Stephen Shore, 'Main Street, Twin Falls, Idaho, 1973.'
THE ARTIST:
Stephen Shore is an American photographer who was born on October 8, 1947. He began to experiment with photography from a very early age, having received a photographic darkroom kit as a present when he was six years old. A turning point for Shore was when he acquired a copy of photographer Walker Even's book, 'American Photographs' when he was ten years old.
After poring over Evan's book, Shore began using a 35mm camera and began making color photographs. This in itself was unusual, as color film was mainly used for product photography and advertising at the time, and was rarely used for general photography. At the age of fourteen, Shore presented some of his color photographs to Edward Steichen, who was then the curator of photography for New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. Steichen was impressed enough with the adolescent Shore's work to purchase three prints for the museum's collection. It was a bold move for an unknown photographer to approach someone of Steichen's stature out of the blue, and to present him with color photographs was unheard of, as all fine art photography up to this point had been done in black and white. But Shore's work was of a caliber that was difficult to ignore. A few years went by, and Shore eventually fell in with artist Andy Warhol, and began documenting Warhol's studio, The Factory, and the resultant cast of characters who spent their time there. By the time Shore had reached the age of 24, he had landed a solo exhibition of his work at The Metropolitan Museum Of Art, one of only two living photographers to receive such an honor up to that point.
After the show, Shore began a series of cross-country trips, in the spirit of Jack Kerouac's 'On The Road'. Shore documented these trips extensively, shooting color photographs of the locations he visited along the way, the places he stayed, and the people he encountered. many of the resultant photographs displayed the banality of the modern American landscape of the early 1970's, in a deadpan documentary style that was similar to another pioneering American color photographer, William Eggleston.
What made these photographs remarkable was their attention to detail due to the use of large-format cameras and film, which allowed Shore to capture each scene with an amazing amount of detail and a lush, true-to-life color palette and range of tonality. The photographs looked more real than reality, because they had a deep depth-of-field that allowed all of the detail of the scenes to be depicted with equal clarity regardless of the distance from the viewer.
Shore compiled these photographic recollections of his excursions into a body of work entitled 'Uncommon Places'. an NEA endowment allowed him to continue this work, which eventually culminated in a 1974 MoMA show and a book, which has become a photographic bible of sorts for color photographers.
THE WORK:
The photograph titled, 'Main Street, Twin Falls, Idaho, 1973' is one of the finer examples of Shore's color work from the 'Uncommon Places' period. Here we see a typical 1970's strip mall with a parking lot in the front along the main street in Twin Falls. several automobiles fill the parking spots in front of the shops, and several neon and aluminum signs are lit, but there are no signs of activity, nor are there any people present in the image. The overcast sky and slightly wet pavement indicate that a rainstorm had recently visited the area. The dense white clouds serve to diminish any harsh shadows that would be present, and also serve to neutralize the color cast of the image. Shore manages to capture the scene exactly as we would have seen it with our own eyes, and allows the colors of the cars and the facades and signs of the buildings to 'pop' with a vibrancy borne of a mature and skilled handling of color balance, without garishness or over-saturation. The image captures the late sixties/early seventies architectural aesthetic along with the classic design of the cars, and its hyper-real detail transports us back in time effortlessly. An everyday scene of a simple strip mall in 1973 becomes a magic time travel experience for the modern viewer.
MY REACTION TO THE WORK:
I have developed a great respect and admiration for Shore's work through viewing his photographs. Having grown up in the mid-seventies through the eighties, this is what I remember my childhood landscape looking like. Before the rise of homogenous box-store culture, before there was a Wal-Mart on every corner and every strip mall in the country looked like it was designed by the same architecture firm, this is what America looked like. There is a character locked inside these images that is sorely missing in modern-day America, a character that was captured by photographers like Stephen Shore who were astute enough to notice scenes like this for their inherent aesthetic value, and astute enough to know they were worth documenting and preserving for future generations. I often wonder if our culture's obsession with 'vintage' and all things 'retro' is born from the loss of this type of aesthetic, which has been intentionally and completely replaced by an even more banal and mind-numbingly ugly alternative. as our culture's collective memory dims in regards to what it was like to be alive during a time when there were no cell phones, no internet or HDTV, art produced during the end of the Twentieth Century becomes more important than ever in terms of retaining a sense of history of who we were as Americans, what we have given up, and what we are becoming as we travel onwards into the Twenty-First Century.
WORKS CITED:
Shore, Stephen, Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen, and Lynne Tillman. Uncommon Places: The Complete Works. New York: Aperture, 2004. Print.
"Stephen Shore." Museum of Contemporary Photography. Web. 07 June 2012. <http://www.mocp.org/collections/permanent/shore_stephen.php>.
"Stephen Shore." 303 Gallery -. Web. 07 June 2012. <http://www.303gallery.com/artists/stephen_shore/>.
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