Journal | A genius, so to speak, for sauntering

Stephen Shore Video

Thursday · April 9, 2009 | posted under: Musings | 0 comments

A fantastic vignette of Stephen Shore at work via: http://www.aphotoeditor.com

Stephen Shore managed an incredible success in fine-art photography at a very early age famously getting his photos into the hands of Edward Steichen, who was the curator of photography at the MoMA, when he was only fourteen-years old. And then Steichen bought a handful of them from this precocious fellow. Since then Stephen Shore has produced series after series of really well-crafted, rigorous images and has clearly spent a lot of time thinking about what it all means. In 1998 he published a deceptively simple book (with a generous collection of images from a variety of photographers), The Nature of Photographs which starts with some very basic ideas like:

A photograph is flat, it has edges, and it is static…

and develops them into mental model:

When photographers take pictures, they hold mental models in their minds; models that are the result of the prodding of insight, conditioning, and comprehension of the world.

…a complex, ongoing, spontaneous interaction of observation, understanding, imagination, and intention.