May 30, 2007 2:26

Stephen Shore: It's the Little Things That Count

Beverly Boulevard and La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles, California, June 21, 1975 — All pictures © Stephen Shore - Courtesy Aperture Foundation

I made it over to the International Center of Photography today to catch the Stephen Shore show that opened there a few weeks ago. Shore has been a favorite of mine since the mid-70s, around the time I also first became aware of the earlier generation of street photographers like Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander whose work was one inspiration for him. No one has ever been better at capturing — and exalting — the banalities of American junkspace. If you can't get to the show, I strongly recommend the book that is Shore's great masterpiece, Uncommon Places; The Complete Works, a compendium of one of the great, multi-year undertakings of American art in the 70s.

On first glance, some of Shore's pictures — some of his best — can give the impression of being utterly pointless scenes along the road. But with a longer look you recognize how powerfully they're constructed. Some of his more complicated pictures, like the one above, now look as measured and classically arranged as Poussins.

Fifth Street and Broadway, Eureka, California, September 2, 1974

Sometimes Shore seems to be experimenting with the problem of how loosely an image can be organized and still hold. He dared to shoot ever more banal locations, as in the picture above, forcing you to reorder your own expectations about where and how to find meaning in the picture. There are some where I still haven't found it, but those are the ones that keep me coming back.


West Ninth Avenue, Amarillo, Texas, October 2, 1974

At other times, especially between 1974 and 1976, he worked, as in the picture above, in the resolutely stable and frontal manner that Walker Evans often favored. That resulted in images of Evans-style stately Americana, but I prefer Shore when he's mucking around in the quotidian mess of roadside America.

He's also the master of the tiny detail that gives meaning to a picture, like the ruffled line of displaced shingles at the edge of a roof, or the tiny figure of a woman in a pink dress. Is this what Roland Barthes meant by "the punctum"? Could be, but to be honest I've never been sure what Barthes meant by that.