The artist and artwork I am going to share in this weekly assignment are quite different from the previous. It is not something like conceptual art or contemporary art. It is photographic art, by Stephen Shore, the photography “Uncommon place”. The whole photography consists of 61 photos that Stephen Shore took on his cross-states travel throughout the whole United States in 10 years. He tries to capture the visual elements that can represent the United States and embraces different colors back to the time when people were still framed by black-and-white photography style.
The first thought coming to my mind when I first read this is “common”. Everything shot in Stephen Shore’s large-format camera is so common in the U.S and also in the media for non-American people to perceive and learn about America. American-style cars, hotels, gas stations, etc. Find subtle strangeness and beauty in parking lots and billboards that show what they really are; With a story to tell. In repeated viewing, new narratives evolve from the depths of each image; A parking lot speaks to the dreams of the American car industry; The billboard’s iconic image depicts the majestic mountain landscape and mocks the landscape it blocks. Here are the clues to the American dream, shrink-wrapped in intuition.
The thing really stands out for me is that Stephen Shore does provide a texture, a United States texture back to the 1980s for me. It is the texture of images, color, elements, composition; and it is also the texture of the story, which you can read something beyond the photo itself, like a story the photo tells for you. Stephen shore shot so many common things in one frame, but leave a huge space for the audience to explore the details, and imagine, generating their own understanding and impression of “what is America”. And all these thinking, or the imagination, are raised by those common things. Uncommon places, common things.
The volume also includes an essay by noted critic Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen alongside a conversation between Shore and fiction writer Lynne Tillman which explores Shore’s methodology within the Pop and Conceptual art movements of the 1960s and 1970s. “To see something spectacular and recognise it as a photographic possibility is not making a very big leap. But to see something ordinary, something you’d see every day, and recognise it as a photographic possibility, that’s what I am interested in.”
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