There's something arbitrary about taking a picture. So I can stand at the edge of a highway and take one step forward and it can be a natural landscape untouched by man and I can take one step back and include a guardrail and change the meaning of the picture radically... I can take a picture of a person at one moment and make them look contemplative and photograph them two seconds later and make them look frivolous.
Stephen ShoreBack in the 70s it cost 15-20$ a shot for the film, the processing, and the contact sheet, now itโs twice that.
Stephen ShoreI wanted to make pictures that felt natural, that felt like seeing, that didnโt feel like taking something in the world and making a piece of art out of it.
Stephen ShoreI was photographing every meal I ate, every person I met, every waiter or waitress who served me, every bed I slept in, every toilet I used.
Stephen ShorePhotography is inherently an analytic discipline. Where a painter starts with a blank canvas and builds a picture, a photographer starts with the messiness of the world and selects a picture. A photographer standing before houses and streets and people and trees and artifacts of a culture imposes an order on the scene - simplifies the jumble by giving it structure. He or she imposes this order by choosing a vantage point, choosing a frame, choosing a moment of exposure, and by selecting a plane of focus.
Stephen Shore