I finally made my way to the Henry Art Gallery on the UW campus to see "The Biographical Landscape: The Photography of Stephen Shore 1968-1993." I have always admired Shore’s work, and I have a first edition of "Uncommon Places" that I cherish. What you get from the book is his masterly conquest of the formalist sensibility as aimed toward the American townscape. The show purports to place Shore's persona in the center of the work, hence the title.
I question curatorial conceits that are so blatant, but making a point and trying to justify it can lead to seeing something, so long as it’s not the be all and end all. The show is useful in showing Shore’s pre-large format work, how he gained his sensitivity to the seen moment in 35mm. What I didn’t know before the show is that he came out of the Warhol circle, and conceptualism is king in the early work. That work feels bound in its era, the early 70’s, and it looks a lot like the kind of photos I was taking at the same time. We photographed the stuff that passed through our lives, a little like photoblogging today, but we did it in black and white and our daily blog was the contact sheet. One series on view was a 360 loop around a person, so the landscape altered but the person stayed put, faced toward the camera, a little game with viewpoint and the linear flow of sequential exposure. It’s the kind of thing that was in the air back then.
But what Shore did is push the craft and the vision into that deep place of personal exploration amid external place, and marry the two into a body of remarkable work. As curated, the work shows a more urban, ironic side of Shore through his work, which I suppose is the purported biographical element, and the intro text is an overwrought justification of how the change of perspective over time is a result of a changing personal stance to the subject. Well, duh, is what I think. Every photo we take is about our personal stance as regards our subject. This is not news, and it is not the most salient fact of anyone’s work outside of the post-modernist camp. What matters is the presence of the work.
I looked at my "Uncommon Places" when I got home. You know, the work has the same power in print as on the wall, which is not the norm. The sequencing has a different feel, of course, one more attentive to formal relationships between photographs. I think there’s something with the scale too--the images on the printed page are contact print size, 8x10.
Here’s a link to the Henry site.
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