Monday, July 4, 2016

Authenticity and the Photograph: The Stephen Shore Retrospective

            The first thing that one notices about Stephen Shore’s Conceptual Portrait work is a certain goofiness. In a square print titled “12:30 pm,” He is turning around, and his elbow is nonchalantly cast over the front seat. His face turns to the camera directly. He sports aviator glasses, a thick mustache, and long hair, all of which were popular at the time. His gaze is intentionally calm and confident: “my car, my kingdom.”
The next square shot, titled “1:00 PM,” lies directly adjacent in the grid yet depicts the same elements in an entirely different manner. This time, the subject’s hands are on the steering wheel. His facial expression is one of hurry and impatience. He looks over his shoulder again, but this time, his expression is different. It anxiously says: “Did you just take a picture?” Though this image is one of many in a grid, it is iconic: It is one of Stephen Shore’s infamous snapshots.


Steven Shore (New York, 1947) is an infamous photographer that has made many contributions to photography as a medium. The collection currently on display in Huis Marseille contains much of his early work in which his signature techniques were first discovered. His work, July 22nd, 1969, he photographed his friend Michael Marsh at half-hour intervals for 24 hours is one of many on display. Huis Marseille is currently presenting what they call the “most comprehensive overview ever” of Stephen Shore’s work to date.
The exhibition offers the onlooker an opportunity to view many of his most popular works. The two most well-known works in the collection are Uncommon Places (1973-1981) and American Surfaces (1972-1973). These two works showcase his most innovative technique. Both American Surfaces and Uncommon Places were shot in what the writers at Huis Marseille call a “snapshot-like” manner. They claim that this style was a deliberate contrast to the serious, hyper-composed, black-and-white trend in photography of the time. Shore’s un-composed images are still trendy today and can be seen in abundance in hipster fashion stores like Urban Outfitters.
            His conceptual portrait work is far less famous than American Surfaces and Uncommon Places but is no less rich. Some of the photographs from the series bear the same “snapshot” quality that is a trademark of Shore’s work. The concept behind the work, too, is quite fascinating. The images are arranged in a grid and labeled by the time they were taken in. For example, “12:30 PM” is followed immediately by “1:00 PM” and then by “1:30 PM” and so on. From a contemporary standpoint, this concept work seems to reveal the basis of his visual thought: the desire to investigate the conditions and effects imposed by the camera on our perception of the world.
Shore was clearly particularly interested in the mediating role played by the camera in the medium of photography. The photograph is (and must always be) made by employing the technology of a camera. The camera’s content is reality reproduced: life distilled in the frame of a photo. A very famous thinker named Walter Benjamin once suggested in his work, “Art in the Age of Technological Reproduction” that in artistic reproduction, the object is mediated by the perception of the artist and by paint. Because the painter's hand (which is not mechanical) is the tool that produces the art, it contains an amount of uniqueness that a technologically reproduced work does not have. A camera, on the other hand, reproduces reality in a consistent and nearly ‘scientific’ fashion.
            Shore’s work here is the camera’s reality—yet it is augmented in several stylistic ways so as to make it appear more human. Firstly, by adding yet another trait to his art that human life is circumscribed by: temporality. The photograph normally is life frozen in a single moment. Perhaps it is an exact moment that we can peer into to get a closer look. Or the perfect moment that we want to pause. But here, we see time—exactly as we experience it, in all its mundane aspects—binding his photography. A majority of his photographs for that reason occur when his subject is asleep underneath his goofy leopard print covers. Shore is known for his ability to take the most mundane, typical activity and make it seem strange and alien. And indeed, suddenly, the act of sleeping becomes interesting for the first time. We notice details about how the subject moves in the night. He is a blanket hog and steals them from the outset of the first half hour from his girlfriend. There is an element here of voyeurism, but not in a predatory manner at all: merely because it is a chance to glance at ourselves in our own most intimate, mundane moments.

            Shore similarly amplifies reality through the juxtaposition of technique in the small space of a single frame. Each small two-and-a-half-inch square print is mounted in a grid within the same frame. They are mounted chronologically.  Though it is clear Shore is constrained by the need to move in a temporal fashion, I have no doubt that he intentionally moved between composing his shots and taking his infamous “un-composed” snapshots. The juxtaposition is rich with meaning. The contrast works to create something that goes beyond both alone. Instead, acting as a dialectical synthesis that causes one to synthesize the composed “cool guy” and the flustered geek. The only real combination of the two is a real, authentic person—who of course—is the very beloved quality of his friend that Shore is attempting to distil in the frames.


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