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The differential photograph
Stephen Shore is difficult. Difficulty can invite evasion, sometimes in the form of comparison, and Shore is often compared: to Walker Evans, with whom he shares an eye for the character of his country; to William Eggleston, with whom he shares a precocious command of color; with Andreas Gursky, with whom he shares an approach of broadness and objectivity (i.e., a mock objectivity). These aren’t bad comparisons — each above similarity is explicit in his work — but they don’t help the viewer understand the photographs. When compared they are, to reverse Richard Wilbur’s construction, least themselves.
Shore’s work, in most cases, does not stun you from across the room. Except for the rich saturation of his large-format prints, his images rarely have the immediate, sensual sweetness of his peers: the spectacle or sublimity of Eggleston, or the awe or magnificence of Gursky. Where Gursky’s confront you with their rigid surface linearity, Shore’s photos retreat into their space. There isn’t, as in Andre Kertész, the witticism of arrangement; in Shore’s work there seems less a personal expression and more an temporary embodiment—rather than extruding depiction for the purpose of expression, they exploit expression for the sake of depiction.
Which isn’t to say he ignores the medium: there is a surety of form, and a certainty of expression. Shore, as he outlines in the statement in the original book Uncommon Places, fusses with the eight by ten, adjusting it on the tripod, moving it a couple inches over, getting all the elements in order. But he doesn’t spring upon decisive moments when the world exceeds itself, or really even attempt to isolate particular incidents that amount, when viewed in concert, to communicate a whole sensibility (Friedlander, for one)—his exposures capture a world fully internal, a world only convincingly bringing to the viewer its shacks and horizons and volkswagens. His occasional nearness to message, as when he shoots a billboard that has been wiped except for a landscape with mountain and clouds in front of a landscape with mountain and clouds (a whiff of Magritte, there) comes off as more or less natural when among his other, less literal works. And here, it seems to me that rather than suggesting the banality that his interviewer Lynn Tillman advances — that the landscape behind is more spectacular than the one painted — it instead widens the breadth of the Uncommon Places series by proportioning the inexplicable among the ordinary, without necessarily confronting or constructing any sort of imperative.
The Complete Uncommon Places expands the much slimmer 1982 volume to a larger format 200-page hardbound with higher resolution reproductions. Shore refers to the new edition as a sort of “director’s cut” — and where that term often implies indulgence, the new edition here transparently builds on, rather than overwhelming, the original collection. (But perhaps it could lose the introduction by Stephan Schmidt-Wulffen, which arches to shoehorn Shore’s work into reigning theories of pop and conceptual art on the basis of the photographer’s childhood friendship with Warhol.)
There are many images included here that succeed those chosen for the original. Among them is an early print of “The Sugar Bowl Restaurant, Gaylord, Michigan” from 1973. The picture, like many in the series, exaggerates its era — the Sugar Bowl is papered in brown and yellow, with vinyl seating. The image exhibits two spaces: interior of the restaurant, with its dim, warm tones and set table places; and exterior, with a hotel advertising phones and TV, telephone lines, and the sun rising in stark white at the end of a two-lane highway. The glass between the two reflects its reversed neon SEA FOOD, creating overlapping pink twists that sit on top on the daylight colors outside.
As in all of Shore’s photographs there is a strong compositional dimension, but one often not oriented parallel to the surface of the image. Here the composition is anchored by two strong verticals — one, at the left side of the frame, formed by the corner of the room and hardened by the folds of the drapes, the ridges in the vinyl bench, and a leg of a chair; and the other in the center, predicated on the division of the window and its reflection in the morning light on the highly polished table. The left vertical is shorter against the receding line of the ceiling, and their comparison draws the image toward the center, working with the dark wallpaper around the edge of the frame towards the bright exterior in the window in the middle of the image. This concentration of detail seems to allow a void or interior space that suggests entry, and intensifies the experience of interior, a perpetual sense of the invitation of the table’s place-settings and empty seats, and the brightness of the exterior, with procession of cars and highway leading to the horizon. With its grading color and recession of space, the photograph creates a sense of place and presence and at its center a yearning or hollowness. However set-off by the anachronism of its texture and decoration, these faint sensations — taken together, announced by their framing — create a photographic place that threatens to be real.
This is the strange effect Shore is capable of achieving in this series: his photos each suggest of themselves a narrative, but one so instant and narrow as to almost disappear into their specifics. In that way they might be called differentials of narrative: infinitesimal but perceptible. Each is a sliver of an extant place, and more concerned with the internal qualities of that place than the eventual aesthetic record they leave, arranged in two dimensions on paper. These slivers, taken together and in their entirety, produce an integration of a complete world — not a factual America of the early 1970s, but one of many Americas, deliberately selected and carved out of space by the photographer. Northrop Frye in “Literature and the Visual Arts” describes a principle of Dutch realism and one found also in the early French impressionists:
Such movements in painting are opposite in tendency to what is called the “picturesque,” the search for a particular spot (often called “unspoiled”) that lends itself to certain pictorial conventions, again usually verbal in origin. In our day the picturesque has been mainly taken over by photography, but a contrast remains between two approaches to visual art: that of the tourist looking in from the outside and that of the native looking out from the inside.
In Shore this distinction is harder to draw — the photographs are literally those of a tourist; Shore was, when he took the photos in this book, engaging in the hallowed tradition of aimlessly driving around the country. But they certainly aren’t pictures that draw their criteria from the appeal to pictorial conventions; they seem to sustain a tension between looking in and looking out. They at once seek to capture something especially unique about their place and time — cacti and American cars both appear significantly in his photos of Texas — and discover, through the precision and effect of their series and arrangement, a nonverbal effect that transcends its vintage.