Stephen Shore

Stephen Shore has spent a lot of time with photography, whether it is taking the photos himself, exploring them or teaching about photography. In his book the Nature of Photography he has spent time looking at a variety of photographs from all different times and genres and tries to find out ‘how the world in front of the camera is transformed into a photograph.’ (Foreword, The Nature of Photography, Phaidon Press Inc., 2010, page 2)

 The Nature of Photographs, critically analyses all aspects of photography from various artists from Robert Adams, Ed Weston to Andre Kertesz. His writing makes you look deeper into the image, searching for the same meanings and ideas he uses. The chosen photos cover a range of subjects from pictures of beds, people to structures. He is so versatile in his writing, looking a range of aspects that I may not have looked at when I first saw the image. He has made me study images in a different way to how I originally did, studying all of the different parts that make the completed piece. He looks at the semiotics of the imagery, focusing on not just what it is but what it says to the viewer. He has split the book into sections the physical level, the depictive level, the mental level and mental modelling and has chosen images accordingly.

His image El Paso Street is from the Depictive Level discussing framing. The picture is of a junction of streets in El Paso, Texas and we can see a man waiting to cross, buildings, a tree and a blue sky. The image reminds me of one by Walker Evans called Gas Station who has also shot a road with buildings and a clear sky but that is only because of the composition. Initially you think well, it’s just a road why is this so important but Shore discusses how we know that this road continues and there’s more than what we can see but “the world of the photograph is captured within the frame”. (Stephen Shore, The Nature of Photography, Phaidon Press Inc., 2010, page 62).  I think this shows how a photo captures a split second of time, the man may never be crossing this road again, the front of the cinema would show other films and the whole setting may now have changed but for this photo, it shows a whole section of a place that could never look this way again.

Stephen Shore, The Nature of Photographs, Phaidon Press Inc. 2010

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