Stephen Shore - Photography and the Limits of Representation

double microphones oh hello good evening thank you very much for coming tonight just a couple of housekeeping things before we start and Steven will be taking questions after the talk as well so perhaps although we're normally quite informal at the topless gallery perhaps if you can keep your questions till the end that's fantastic so as some of you will know that photographers galleries just started a very exciting year-long refurbishment program at our site on Romany Street and when I asked Stephen quite a few months ago now appeals interested in coming to speak here as part of our series on photography and the built environment I was extremely pleased that he said yes and would be kicking off our series of talks events seminars and lectures and various collaborations over a year with the Club Med's galleries talks department and this is our first in the series of talks in and around the Soho area so tonight it's just outside this over area Stephens work has been widely exhibited over the past 35 years but I'm sure most of you will know his work probably mostly through his publications and his books uncommon places Essex County and American services amongst others since 1982 he has been the director of the photography program at Bard College in upstate New York where he is the Susan Webber professor in arts so we have straight up its people thank you thanks Johanna and thanks to all of you for coming a number of years ago I was reading the American magazine The New Republic reading a review by their film critic Stanley Kaufman and this was the one time that Kaufman wrote about still photography instead of film he had gone to a show of Alfred Stieglitz's photographs Stieglitz his home in Lake George New York that was at the Museum of Modern Art and he he wrote how beautiful each of the pictures were how impressed he was with the show and then went on to say that that evening he went to a screening of Berryman's film wild strawberries and that every shot in the film was as beautiful as a Stieglitz photographed and Bergman had the advantage of working in a more complete medium and when I read that I realized that Kaufman didn't understand still photography that still photography is a meaning and poetry come from its incompleteness a photograph can imply a narrative but it it never really is narrative it can describe but it explains very little this picture here doesn't explain why this Victorian gentleman is sitting in a yard full of apples to understand photography's limits to understand its incompleteness we need to understand how a three-dimensional world flowing in time is transformed into a static flat photograph there are four major factors of this transformation their flatness the frame time and focus first is flatness the world is three-dimensional simple the world is three-dimensional a photograph is flat and not only is it flat but it except for the rare case of of stereo cameras it's seen with monocular vision and when a three-dimensional image is projected through a single lens on a plane relationships are created in space which don't exist in the real world what I mean by that is in this photograph there is a very specific relationship between the cloud above the yield sign and the street sign to say it didn't exist in the real world doesn't mean that the yield sign wasn't there and the cloud wasn't there but this relationship of one touching the other wasn't there in the real world it only exists in a photograph and so any photographer confronting the three-dimensional world is thinking about how relationships between the foreground and the background will evolve and to do this you control the vantage point the exact placement of the camera and so here's one of mine and again you see relationships from the foreground to the background the chevron sign and and the lampposts behind it so it's a very complex network of relationships are created by flatness the second transformative factor is the frame photographers often think of the frame as the beginning of a picture it's where the picture begins not just someplace that it has to end it's the beginning of the structure of the picture and if you look at this picture you'll see that all the visual relationships contained in it all refer back to the frame it's the beginning of the Pyxis geometry the frame also creates relationships that don't exist in the world bye-bye emphasis by grouping things in a frame it draws our attention to relationships and a very slight movement of a frame can radically alter the meaning of a picture but this is a picture by the photographer Robert Adams and if you look carefully in the lower right-hand corner not that visible in the light in this room but you can just make it out is a railroad track it would have been very easy for him to move the frame a little bit to the left and a little up and avoid the railroad track and have a picture of a forested hillsides but by including the railroad track in fact by including as little as possible and have it be recognizable in a way emphasizing it by its own minimal nassif keys making you think about a relationship between the railroad track and this hillside and if you can read topography you would realize that this is a hill that had been forested that had been clear-cut except for the trees standing at the crown of the hill and that the logs were taken away on that railroad track so this is slight movement of the frame radically halters the pictures meaning the next transformative factor is time and it appears in two primary ways in the picture one is frozen time where the flow of time appears to be stopped in mid action and here again a new event is created by by saying a new event I don't mean that this steer and his handler are not there in front of the camera but the steers tongue meeting the handler Stetson in perfect symmetry only existed for a 250th of a second and it frozen like this for us to examine is a new moment in time or time can appear to be still the last transformative factor the last tool formal tool of photography that that photographers have to control in translating the three-dimensional dynamic world into the flat static photograph is focused there is no point of folk plane of focus in the world but a camera always imposes a plane of focus and by imposing that plane of focus prioritizes one plane over all others in the scene Vermeer used a camera obscura as an aid in his painting but being a painter he didn't have to exactly represent what was on the ground glass of the camera obscura and so while the camera obscura would only have one plane of focus he wasn't bound by that he could paint the drape in the foreground and the painter in mid-ground and the girl and map in the background as though they all were on the plane of focus but as a photographer we can't do that we have to decide one plane and prioritize it so there are because there are these four different transformative factors we have four different tools of selection and they are focus the moment we take the picture and the duration that the picture of the exposure lasts the choice of the frame and the choice of vantage point and they define the image Photography is inherently an analytic medium where a painter starts with a blank canvas and every mark that she or he makes on the canvas makes it more complex a photographer and so paintings is inherently synthetic Photography is the opposite a photographer starts with the whole world and every decision brings order to it to my mind a photograph is solved more than it is composed a photographer combines perception a perception of the world perception of photography of art of fruit a perception about perception about themselves a photographer combines a perception with an understanding of these transformations essentially with an understanding of photography's limitations in 1993 I was commissioned to photograph in the Italian town of loot Zara in a small village in the Po Valley this is the this is the same village that Paul strand had visited 40 years before and produced his book when PA say when I was preparing to go on this trip an Italian his starring the photography sent me a copy of a letter that Paul strand had written while he was in Lutz ARRA to a friend back in the states in which strand said it was very difficult to photograph there because Anam quoting strand there were no buildings of architectural interest here here's a Maya copy of wouldn't pay a say which I've had since I've had a firm at least 4045 years and I hadn't thought about it but opened up the book and realized in fact there were very few photographs of architecture and so I wondered about this phrase what did strand mean by architectural interest because clearly it meant something different to him than it did to me so 4-strand here's a picture he did in the Outer Hebrides it could be a simple handmade structure that expresses man's unity with the earth or it could be a start the stark spiritual spirituality of a New England church for some photographers architectural interests could be a significant work of architecture or it could be a monument of the ancient world but there's another tradition in photography that goes back to photography's very origins this is by Talbott these photographers saw architecture as a visual manifestation of cultural forces and a camera obviously can only deal with the visible so what I'm saying is if a photographer wants to explore these cultural forces the means they have presented world presents to them for doing this is architecture and the built environment this tradition stretches from Talbot to George Washington Wilson to Thomas anin to charles marvel - Eugenia J who made this picture and to Walker Evans who made this photograph of the dining room in Belle Grove Plantation Evans was the subject of the first solo photography show at the Museum of Modern Art the director of the photography department at the time was a man named Beaumont Newhall in Newhall wrote a book called the history of photography in an early edition of that book he had a chapter called recent trends and he outlined four recent trends they were the document the straight photograph the formalists photographs and the equivalent so the document is a picture that essentially points at something in the world and says look at this this is worthy of your attention the straight photograph is the self-conscious work of art where the photographer is saying look at this piece of paper with an image on it this is worthy of your attention the formalist photograph explores the structural qualities of an image or the formal nature of the medium and the equivalent he borrows the term here from Alfred Stieglitz stands for or engenders a state of mind or an emotional state and when I think about the photographs that I that mean the most to me like this picture by Evans it seems that these distinctions don't get to the point that a complex picture like this is all four of these of these trends as as newhall call them and that i that the most the pictures that mean most to me in fact are two three or all four of these and on top of this Evans well let me say that if you if one were to questions as evidence even think of this as an equivalent the one time I saw Evans speak at the Museum Modern Art in the early 70s he showed a number of his pictures and spoke of them as being transcendent documents and I as I understand what he was saying he was talking about the picture existing as a document and as an equivalent at the same time and ab evans add something else to this mixture he's also spoke of his work in the 30s as being in documentary style and what he meant by that I take this to be a that he was showing a postmodern understanding of how style draws a meaning through its cultural reference so the form the picture is taking the kind of matter-of-factness the flash the flash is reminiscent of news photography at the time by choosing this form he's drawing meaning to it from the cultural reference of the form itself I did something a little similar in the early 70s when I took a trip across America and produced the work from this series called American surfaces as Kodak made snapshots they sent the film off to my local corner photo store they sent it to Kodak and they were the prints were exhibited as little three by five snapshots the next 12 images I'm going to show you were made as part of the series without caption or comment a photographer can communicate the taste of an era through content structure and form so I chose to show them as snapshots because they would that that form would in part part of the taste that a part of the savor of the time that I was trying to communicate as snapshots they were themselves cultural artifacts for a thirty year period jean char Kowski was the director of the photography department at the modern and he wrote a very interesting piece about what a photographer does and by photography were many interesting pieces government read one of them as a way of beginning one might compare the art of photography to the act of pointing all of us even the best mannered of us occasionally point and it must be true that some of us point to more interesting facts events circumstances and configurations than others it's not difficult to imagine a person who might elevate the act of pointing to a creative plane a person who had lead us through the fields and streets and indicate a sequence of phenomena and aspects that would be beautiful humorous morally instructive cleverly ordered mysterious or astonishing once brought to our attention but had been unseen before or seen dumbly without comprehension this practitioner of the new discipline would perform with a special grace sense of timing narrative sweep and wit the sand down the act not merely with intelligence but with that quality of formal rigor that identifies a work of art so that we would be uncertain when remembering the adventure of the tour how much of our pleasure and sense of enlargement came from the things pointed to and how much from a pattern created by the pointer Jocasta goes on to say that what he just said was only a vague approximation because photographers really don't point as I mentioned before they frame now I'm going to show some work of mine I'm going to start with some recent work this was the first few images were made in Israel what am i well a large project that I've been involved in there I've been there about three months of the past year working and one of my interest is how land is built on this is an Israeli settlement in the West Bank this is a sixth-century monastery in the middle of the Judean Desert a Druze village in the north take a look at this picture and let me ask you to look at the foreground and move your attention along the ground without skipping over anything all the way to the horizon and I'd like you to tell me if when you're doing this you have the cessation of your eye changing focus that as you move your attention from the foreground to the top of the hill you actually feel your eye changing focus anyone you have find this very interesting because you're looking at a flat screen and I'll tell you what I take this to me when we look at anything in the world we are looking at a visual image in our minds our eyes work just like a digital camera the lens of our eye focuses and upside down and backward image on a digital sensor array called the retina which sends an electrical signal to the brain which creates an image all we ever see is a mental image when you're looking at this picture you're seeing a three-dimensional mental image because the picture is sending you Clues is sending your mind clues to build a three-dimensional mental image of it not a flat mental image and so the sensation of focus is the cessation of moving your attention through that three-dimensional space that three-dimensional mental space this picture shows Palestinian villages on the hilltops and a Bedouin camp in the valley you may notice how the meaning of these pictures is altered by the verbal information I've been supplying to you I think that realization goes to the heart of some of photography's limitations this picture was made in Hebron it's a guard post separate separating the Israeli settlement in Hebron from the Palestinian city I'm going to show you some work of mine from the 1970s these were made with on a series of trips across North America they were all made with with view cameras a photographer trying to communicate his or her perception of the currents below the surface of things has to find instances where these currents are visibly manifest there's an old Arab saying the apparent is the bridge to the real for many photographers architecture serves this function architecture is the form in which many cultural forces find expression and become therefore look for accessible to a mute visual medium buildings express the physical constraints of their materials a building made of curved i-beams and titanium can look different from one made of sandstone blocks a building expresses the economic constraints of its construction and a building expresses the aesthetic parameters of its builder and its culture for better for worse this latter is the product of all the diverse elements that make up style traditions aspirations conditioning imagination posturings perceptions on a city street the building is sited between others built or renovated at different times and in different styles and these buildings are next to still others and this whole complex scene experiences the pressure of weather and time the taste of the personality of society becomes accessible to a camera in this picture for example I'm interested Oh on these trips I was making I found I could explore a North American culture and explore photography at the same time that the two were united and so in terms of the the transformations I talked about before I'm thinking about the relationship of the lamppost on the right to the edge of the building to the eve of the building and how it appears on when flattened onto the picture plane at the same time I'm thinking about how how this New England industrial town ends here this street marks the end of the town and the countryside begins and I'm interested in this transition so for a number of years I was making these trips across the country I was living in New York at the time and didn't know in a car and so I rent cars and the rented cars in the early 70s didn't have tape decks in them so I'd listened to a lot of top-40 radio which eventually got very tiring and I would amuse myself on these trips by reciting speeches from Shakespeare and one of the speeches that knit the most to me was from Hamlet Hamlet has brought a group of actors to his castle to put on his play and he gives them an acting lesson the acting lesson begins with the description of the relationship of form to content and ends with a description of meaning he tells them suit the action to the word and the word to the action with this special observance that you overstep not the modesty of nature for anything so overdone is away from the purpose of playing whose purpose was in his first and last to hold as it were the mirror up to nature to show virtue her own feature scorn her own image and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure so I'd like to look at that a little closely as I said it begins with the relationship of form to content suit the action to the word and the word to the action and what's implied there is that there's an integral relationship of form to content that form is not simply a prettification of content form isn't art sauce that's poured over content but that form and structure are ways of elucidating content ways of bringing meaning to content by analogy the same way grammar brings meaning to sentences I could string a few words together randomly and you may get some little snippets of meaning from hearing those words but for you to understand what I'm saying now is based on a mutual understanding and a common grammar and this is the function that structure plays in a photograph but then Shakespeare says or Hamlet says / step not the modesty of nature for anything so overdone is away from the purpose of playing so that is a plea for what I would call transparency that these structural decisions are not to call attention to themselves but that you see through them almost transparently to the subject so that an average viewer may not even realize what the artist has done or what the actor has done then Hamlet goes on to talk about meaning to hold as it were the mirror up to nature to show virtue her own feature and scorn her own image will this scorn and virtue seemed to me more the province of literature and drama and film and not still photography but it's this last line of his to show the very age and body of the time his form and pressure that seems to present a goal that many photographers have striven for to show the very age and body of the time his form and pressure thank you so thank you very much Steven and I think now we're going to open I put a microphone here and my colleagues got one there if we're slightly sort of we put a slightly sort of apartheid situation where the architects are in this area photography people in this area so but well we're sort of taking that in perhaps I'll ask a question just so that people can kind of constraint in a little bit I was just really about and it's quite straightforward basic one release but the perspective shift between your American pictures it feels like you're very much on the streets you're at a low level and then the ones more recently in Israel very much more from a from a further away distance and just if that's something to do with the fact that you are so very much sort of embodied in those American pictures and perhaps you're standing back further when you're looking at me I'm standing back further in the ones I've shown you because I'm interested in the forms of the land yeah and so I need to be back further to simply to show the way information and is there anything to do with that and the fact that you're interested in the sort of political kind of situation well of course you are in the American pictures as well but perhaps from from a different perspective from being within them being that the thing when you were taking these pictures you were so very much embodied in them somehow at that time in America I'm more involved in the pictures in America and I don't think that's the case in terms of did you use the word political you and working in Israel is very interesting because politics is on people's mind so all the time there but in working there I found I came really head-to-head with photography's limitations think about as I mentioned when I showed you this pictures how much information you got from a simple sentence that I attached to each of the images and then I showed one that I didn't say anything about and you may not have understood really what that picture was about who sprayed painted those mug and Ovid's on the doors what did it mean can a photograph explain what it means I don't think it can and so I think there is a complexity of the political situation there that could be hinted at in photographs and that if someone is familiar with the country could read the into photographs and could read when they see you could you could learn to recognize the difference between an hour in the West Bank and Arab village and railey settlement because the Israeli settlements usually have orange roofs and the our villages all have black water tanks on them otherwise it's hard to distinguish but if you if you knew this you could distinguish it but in the audience in England it wouldn't have any way of knowing that there's just so much that can be said so simply in one sentence that can't be addressed at all in photography and what I hope that brought across tonight was that photography I agree with partially with Stanley Kaufman that photography is limited but this is the world that we photographers have chosen to live in and and use its limitations and part of the understanding of the limitations is an understanding of what we can't deal with we can show things however described things in a way words cannot possibly describe for example we took off this projector okay you can describe you can go from edge to edge in a picture and put into words a description of everything you see and what's that description might take five minutes to read you lose the simultaneity of experience and to see that the Israeli settlement in front of the vineyard and see it in the hillsides in that light gleaming in the light all at one time you can't get that experience of simultaneity of the simultaneity of relationships in words because simply it's a linear medium words are and it takes time to work through them so photographs describe in a way words possibly cannot possibly describe words have limitations too so can you say something a little bit more about the sea reality or producing things in a big series in your work I mean in that regard and you've talked brilliantly about how a single image will work and then you show us a series and I wonder if you could say a little bit more about what it means for whether its forms or content or how it is that it that works through a large group of images one of the joys of photography is that a photographer can deal with many problems in one day many problems in one picture and many pictures and therefore many many problems in one day some projects but mine and other people's depend on seeing the work in sequence or indicator group others are made with different intents and the pictures are meant to stand alone I'm just finishing with Amanda editing a book where everything is made to be seen in sequence and it changes the nature of the individual image because the image doesn't have to stand alone and the work is the sequence and the complexity of the work is the variety or is the range and focus of the works within the sequence this takes a certain kind of pressure off the individual picture and the picture that trees it to be more notational a quicker observation so I find I work in in both ways and sometimes it'll take individual works and but still group them in a sequence but they're made but with that is a sequence of freestanding workers which I got commonplace I just working um I read summer I don't know how accurate this is Steven but I read somewhere that recently that Gary winter ground had made a quote I was stating that the most successful photographs on the edge of failure and I think he was talking about the relationship between form and content but I'm not sure I wonder if you could illuminate that for us one of the things that I've been teaching for a long time they're one things I find it difficult to explain to students is the difference between a picture that's an illustration and a picture that's the photograph and so I occasionally ask people I meet how they would define it and I once asked for house key and he said an illustration is a picture whose problems were solved before the picture was made so you see a murderer had just as I talked about relationships being created in a picture that didn't exist in the world and so they only come together they don't even come together in your eye literally they come together in a photographers understanding of how what they're seeing is going to be translated so there's this new relationship created in the photograph in the same way there are problems to be solved by a picture that are solved in the actual making of the photograph and I think that relates to what we need we're in the same I know I can speak for myself and say that when I'm involved in a project and questions stop arising and I find myself repeating myself I lose total interest in the project any movement go to in a new completely new direction in my work because there are no more problems to solve there thank you my extension then would creativity in photography be the solving of problems that you didn't know existed well you know there exist when you're working on them I what I find often happens is let's say let's say during the period of American uncommon places a series of problems arose and they would arise on their own it's not like I'm sitting in my loft in New York thinking of what probable I saw the next it was this would become a question in my mind and let me add that I'm convinced that all most good art is produced for this reason not to produce good art I don't think artists decide I'm gonna make some good art today probably not good I think most artists have these issues that their minds they can't get out of their head and the way they deal with it is to produce the art that's why I would as I would solve or deal with one or two or three questions or whatever I was dealing with at the time new questions almost up by themselves would arise and this propelled the work forward there been other times where I've had specific issues on my mind and so there came a time in the around 1980 where I found I was beginning to repeat myself with uncommon places work that I would go to a village I go to a town go to a city and I would know exactly where to stand and I know exactly where how to make sense two-dimensional sense of three-dimensional space it was it became easy and had no interest right but there was one problem that I had been working on for years that I felt like that was unsolvable now well why is it that some photograph that I see have a have a convincing illusion of three-dimensional space and for years I tried to deal with it in structural terms what happens if I use one-point perspective what happens if I have the edge of a road go exactly into the corner of the picture or a hair above the corner of the picture what if there's a car just jutting in from the frame to establish the picture plane what if I have telephone poles in close tension to the frame of the picture trying to use these structural means but figuring out how this was created how this sense of three-dimensional space was created and this relates to the picture I showed you where I asked you to focus through the space of the picture because I found myself for various reasons living in Montana and would go out into the high meadows there and there were no roads to offer one-point perspective and no telephone poles and I had was just out on this open land and the question that arose can I do it here how there's something there's some other I can see it I can stand here and be acutely aware of myself in this vast space maybe more acutely aware than in a city but without any any means for structural articulation available can this be represented in a photograph and that took me about 10 years to to figure it out which is if you think about that picture I showed you there is a road in the foreground that has some perspectival impact but I think basically what's operating that a picture is not that you were you were saying about everybody's pointing at something he said photographers are framing things and I wondered whether you're always in the picture on the screen was actually a picture of a table or some magazines on it and I wondered whether you were pointing or whether you were looking and pointing or framing or whether you were arranging and then framing and pointing it was a table was a lamp and two magazines or something I mean not particularly this one picture but in general arranging or are you always looking and right I wasn't in that picture but I there's something so arbitrary in a way about the decisions of photographer mates and I think a good example is the Robert Alice picture I showed of the hillside and the train track where he can go like this and it's the meaning of the picture changes immensely it goes like that and it's a totally different picture it's so easy for this to be in a photographers I'm seasoning in photographers control but I don't see where arranging something on a tabletop makes any difference and I don't do that but I've driven my car into pictures if a car if the picture needs a car you know I'll put it in and then I'll look in the camera and say oh no it really needs to be a couple of feet back so I'll get back in the car and back it up a little bit and that seems that seems minor but yes and and I wanted to give a slight clarification to what I was saying earlier during the talk about photography being analytic it can it is an analytic view but @nd of a synthetic subject for example there's a photographer Gregory cruson and in crude since early work he was building dioramas on tabletops he had this huge table in his studio and he who build these dioramas with little with a pond and huge insects and suburban houses in the background I'm filling this large tabletop with this with this so he was building an entirely synthesized world but then you get behind the camera and move around it and make totally analytic photographic positions well the reason I'm mentioning his work is because if he knew in advance how the picture was going to turn out he wouldn't need to build a rectangular diorama all he would need to build as a triangle following the line of sight of the camera but he didn't because he's inherently a photographer fabricating this world but then moving around it making the same analytic decisions that I make walking through attempt huh you give them you've spoken tonight about the how you frame a picture in the relations of putting things into a two-dimensional space like with the street signs etc but you've also spoken before about how the view camera the amount of time it would take you to look at a scene with your eyes in the same detail that you get from the view camera is you know about half an hour 45 minutes I also know looking through the view of the Grand Master of the U cameras you're not going to be able to see everything that you're going to see in the final print on your ground glass I was wondering how often have you found when you've got pictures back that you you'd find things in them that you hadn't necessarily intended to be there with which which make the photograph perfect but anything I think the pitch that made me think of it today was there's one with contrails of airplanes which which just go along exactly the same line is the that's the the wires in the street yeah and I was wondering did you when you were taking it did you see the contrails yeah but how often do you ever find when you get that that you get a picture in you something go this is so much better than I thought because there's a there's a boy's face it actually first of all you said and it's true that you can't see everything on the ground blast but the photograph isn't the photographer most photographers they use view cameras don't make their decisions really looking at the ground glass it's all looking at the world and it's only the final decisions of exact framing that are made on the ground glass so when I'm looking at that scene the cameras next to me and I'm just looking at it and I'm deciding without it often I would leave my car and leave coins on the ground where I'm just going to go take pictures of the scene and I'm just walking around saying hey here's a so all these decisions are made just with my eyes so it's not because yeah looking through a camera you really wouldn't see that much so my question is also to do with framing it's getting a bit repetitive um I was interested when you're talking about framing and pointing in relation to which camera using you said to use the view camera and also the the Kodak snapshot one and you also showed an image of of this deer licking the handlers hat and and I think that's probably an image that you wouldn't necessarily cap to with the view camera and I was wondering they couldn't couldn't but you'd be you have to maybe wait a long time for it and I was thinking maybe whether your use of the the Kodak snapshot camera was through a frustration at missing some of these fleeting moments and when you change I mean not sure it was maybe the only instance that you showed of using this natural camera whether that was a conscious decision to move back to the view cam well personal let me start the last part it was a conscious decision to move the video camera the use of the snapshot camera was not about getting things I couldn't get it with the view camera because I did that that point hadn't even used a new camera so I wasn't feeling any limitation in the view camera and if you think of all the pictures that I showed you with the snapshot camera there were very few of them if any that couldn't have been taken with the view camera and that I took pictures quite similar to that the following year with the view camera maybe there was nothing that I showed you that was actually stopping that was freezing time all of the speaker's couldn t make you the project was much larger and there were pictures in the project which that couldn't have been made with your camera but it wasn't it was because I wanted to make I wanted to make snapshots I wanted to make a little brightly colored glossy snapshot study that I not because of something I couldn't do okay okay okay yeah I wondered if you had any like sort of views or experiences of how it's been working with the medium of photography and its kind of status in which i think is maybe slightly different in American institution is to maybe like European and speaking you're experiencing and not how it's been sort of working with photography as a medium we relate to the olive oil institutions like its kind of place in it about that kind of thing well it's changed a lot in the time I've been working and I think it's changed for both better and worse and I would say the dangers were that well for example and I stopped I around 1980 I stopped the series and uncommon places for the reasons I I gave that I saw myself beginning to repeat myself and I've lost interest in it when I did that two of my dealers dropped me now when you're selling pictures for $200 a piece it's not the end of the world and so I can say look it doesn't matter to me if they don't show my work anymore I'm doing what I'm interested in and I see my students today some of them making decisions about how they're going to proceed on their art based on the market which maybe I'm being too idealistic but I don't think this is the way you make these decisions and I think in time over the long period of time the decisions made for that reason are going to be filtered out so there was there was a kind of wonderful purity to the photography world forty years ago because there was no money involved and there was no fame involved and you did it because you wanted to do it the good side however I'm not saying this is all bad the good side is I can make a living at it now and that's important so which would I rather have I rather have it today but but it takes a certain kind of stamina and safe to say I don't care if my last show was successful I'm I have new interests I have new questions in my mind I'm going you're following it i-i-i was interested in your idea that the photographer chooses the incompleteness of its medium to explore and i wanted to ask if you think that the camera that is the instrument of the medium becomes also a mediator between the photographer's inner self and and the immediate environment and and therefore maybe the work of a photographer as much as it can be analytical in in its descriptions and descriptiveness as much it is also descriptive of its also and maybe psychoanalytical in that sense that not only the image of the surrounding of the actual world around the photographer is portrayed but also the inner world of a photographer in its viewing the completeness of of the photographer's work I'm still not sure I understand your question what does that have to do with the voice of the camera know that the the camera becomes then not only like a tool to recreate a reality but the mediator between one's inner self and how I understand environment yes so you don't not only match the world on the screen but also something yes and I think where this comes into play is what I've refer to a number of a couple of times about using the sense of three-dimensional space as an example and what and I'm talking about three-dimensional space because it's the most matter-of-fact example but what it essentially is saying that is that there are subtle qualities of a photographer's perception that are communicated in the photograph and unconvinced that any that a photographer who has had experience with the needle I'm not saying someone who never picked up a camera before but someone who's had a lot of experience and who essentially mastered the formal tools and the mechanical tools in that they're the perceptual aspects of their state of mind can be impressed upon a photograph is that addressing with your thing and I've talked about specifically the perception of three-dimensional space because it seems the most matter-of-fact to talk about but behind that is an implication that there are much larger and deeper issues that anyway hi I'd like to perhaps ask a question sort of standing back and I'll be very interested in here what you think about looking back over your career and from those initial road trips that you undertook which certainly in my mind kind of become very important in the evolution of the history of photography from the point at which you took off that did the early part of your when I was studying photography how photography's evolved over that the period of time to where we are today a reference at an Exhibition I think in Brighton and Veniamin captures some of the work that was done early on it on earlier on and sent some of the work I think that they have on display of certain photographer's above working around that time and also the way that contemporary photography in particular meeting of the Becker school has evolved and half of the connections have been made to working some of the other photographers whenever Eggleston perhaps just generally your view on on the world of photography as is changed over this period of time sort of in the world of photography in terms of what photographers are doing lad in terms of the trated world if the total Jimmy's obviously changed enormously since when you went out on the road trip to photography broad meaning in terms of the people taking of people who taking pictures as it is today for instance but also that has been you I think it's a strand of a type of Photography or capturing with the environment law this particular kind of vision that's the goal interesting I thought we have caught some heat a vision of that spectrum it's it's I'm not sure this exactly answers your question let me try it's seemed to me that apprenticeship is a useful and important way of learning and discipline but that photography as it was practiced for or by artists didn't lend itself because until recently photographers didn't artists photographers didn't have studios didn't have assistants and so well an apprentice would only be in my way or I would be if I wanted to be Walker Evans apprentice I would be in his way so that opportunity didn't present itself but what I realized was that you can apprentice yourself to a tradition and there is a tradition that ran through photography that I very enforce five slides quickly ran through from Talbot to Marvel to ashay to Evans that had that expressed both an interest in the world and an interest in exploring the medium the formal qualities of the meeting at the same time and I I feel that to some extent other influences on me like the time I spent with Andy Warhol and I also my exposure to the work of Ed Roche and two different painters and composers and lots of influences anyone would have in experiencing modern cultural life but within that there there was this strain of of an apprenticeship to a tradition and I think that continues and there other people some of whom you've mentioned who have have continued in that line just needs to say thank you very much

Channel: AA School of Architecture

Views: 30,877

Keywords: Architectural Association, Public Programme, 2010, The Photographer’s Gallery, Stephen Shore, Photography, Limits of Representation

Id: V_ZUh8FN1qk

Length: 74min 44sec (4484 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 04 2015