Stephen Shore APR/may 2000

I first saw Stephen Shore’s photographs — and started collecting them — at the Light Gallery in New York in the late ’70s. It was a kind of revelation; exquisitely composed color pictures made with an 8 x 10 view camera, whose subject was the new topography of fast-food restaurants and sprawling subdivisions that was just beginning to take over the American landscape. In these photos, everything seemed to come together — the influence of Walker Evans and Robert Frank as well as of Ed Ruscha and Andy Warhol. Most of all, they evoked my own experiences traversing the America of the ’70s, when the interstates felt like a network of portals into an alien planet.

Shore was a crucial figure in the first generation of photographers to turn away from black and white photography, then the “artistic” standard, and to embrace the kind of color produced by mass-market film and color paper — a shift that has turned into common practice in contemporary photography. He was also one of the first photographers to return to the larger negatives that have been subsequently used so effectively by artists such as Andreas Gursky and Jeff Wall to give a sense of hyper-reality to their work.

If Shore’s influence was eclipsed by photographic appropriation in the ’80s, his vision for photography has become ubiquitous since the early ’90s, partially as a result of his friendship with the German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, who introduced a generation of their students to his work.

Last month, a never-before-exhibited group of Shore’s 35 mm pictures from 1972 was shown at 303 Gallery in New York. This early work reveals yet another chapter of his complex history, and uncannily anticipates the “snap shot” photography that has become such a significant trend in recent years.

Peter Halley: I actually met you at the end of the ’70s. A friend and I were walking down Lexington Avenue, and you were there handing out leaflets — a satire on the possibility of a Soviet attack on the U.S.

Stephen Shore: It’s possible. [laughs] I did a number of projects at that time like that. In about 1970 I did a series of postcards in Amarillo. They were the ten highlights of Amarillo — the main street, which is Polk Street, the tallest building, the civic center, the hospital. And then more local highlights, like Doug’s Barbecue, which was the best place to get barbecued beef. I thought what the New York art world wanted more than anything was postcards from Amarillo, Texas. I got Wittenborn to agree to sell them, and had 56,000 printed.

Peter: Do you still have some?

Stephen: I still have some.

Peter: Oh, good.

Stephen: And I miscalculated, and no one was interested in them. [laughs] But the backs of the cards didn’t give the name of the town. It just would say “Polk Street” or “Doug’s Barbecue.” So when I did all these trips across the country, I’d go to postcard racks in various towns and stuff them full of these cards.

Peter: That’s fantastic. Well, in a way, I do want to go over your early years. Can we start by your telling me a little bit about growing up in New York?

Stephen: Well, I actually started doing darkroom work before I was interested in taking pictures. An uncle of mine gave me a darkroom set for my sixth birthday. He thought it was something that a kid might like. I did, and I developed pictures, just my family’s snapshots, in my bathroom at home.

Peter: Which were black and white, I’d assume.

Stephen: Yes. I immediately fell in love with it, and got my first 35-millimeter camera when I was eight or nine. Our upstairs neighbor was a very smart man. For my tenth birthday he gave me a copy of American Photographs by Walker Evans. So one of my earliest influences was Walker Evans.

Peter: My great-uncle had a copy of Albers’ Interaction of Color, which I saw when I was about fifteen. I guess these things can change your life.

Stephen: Yes. I mean, I could have gotten anything.

Peter: What about your meeting Edward Steichen?

Stephen: I was about fourteen, and I think I just didn’t know any better. I called him up and I said, “I’d like to come and show you my work.” It was as simple as that. Maybe if I was older he would have hedged a bit.

Peter: What did you take pictures of when you were fourteen?

Stephen: Oh, mostly of people around the city. They weren’t very good. But he got three for the museum.

Peter: This being the Museum of Modern Art.

Stephen: Yes.

Peter: Later on you ended up photographing Warhol’s Factory. Your parents must have been worried.

Stephen: I think they gave up on me by that point. But I had parties at our house. Andy would come, and my mother befriended Nico. I think the combination of giving up on me and at the same time having these celebrities come to the house somehow, if not made it okay, made it acceptable.

Peter: So did you just ring Warhol’s bell?

Stephen: I made a short film called Elevator, which was shown at a place that Jonas Mekas had, the Filmmaker’s Cinematheque, on the same night as one of his films. This was in ’65. And I just introduced myself. He was already well-known in the New York art world, and there were interesting things going on around him, and I simply asked, “Can I come over and take pictures?”

Peter: And you were only sixteen or seventeen at the time?

Stephen: Seventeen, yeah. I essentially stopped going to school my senior year in high school. There were great revival houses in New York — the Thalia, the New Yorker, the Bleecker Street Cinema, and then the Modern. And Jonas Mekas always had some theater going. So I was going to films every day. Some of them were old Hollywood films, or European films. I’d see anything from Carl Dreyer to Stan Brakhage.

Peter: It’s interesting that you were always just drawn to this stuff.

Stephen: But I also began to think aesthetically in a different way just being around Andy. Just watching him work. I don’t think I went there thinking “I’m going to observe.” It just was inevitable. A lot of people who were there were hanging out, but Andy was rarely hanging out. He was working.

Peter: The Factory photos are so good, compositionally and the control of light. What was your goal in making them?

Stephen: I don’t think I’d formulated a goal, the way I have in work after this, where there were certain problems that I felt I was working on. This was just more intuitive.

Peter: And then at some point, you decided to go to Texas.

Stephen: Well, I had friends in Amarillo. There was a certain generation of people in Amarillo who all came to New York. Stanley Marsh, whose younger brother was named Michael — I must have met Stanley in the late ’60s, and we became friends right away.

Peter: Michael’s brother Stanley also commissioned Robert Smithson’s last earthwork. In fact, I guess all those people were interested in contemporary art, the Marsh Family way out in Amarillo ...

Stephen: I started going there just for the same reasons that I was attracted to the Factory — that it was an exciting place, interesting people, a shock to my system. I saw in Amarillo a kind of friendship and hanging-out that I never got growing up in Manhattan. A lot of them who were living in New York would still go back to Amarillo in the summer, and for a number of years I went there every year for a month or so.

Peter: There are more photographs of people in ’72 than there are in your work later in the ’70s. Despite the fact that they are so candid and offhand, the people in them are pretty glamorous, with this sort of decadent hippie feeling. I was wondering if there’s anybody you might identify.

Stephen: This is a man named Rogers Whitaker, who was an editor at The New Yorker and who, under the nom de plume of E.M. Frimbo, was the greatest train authority in America. This man is P. Adams Sitney, who is a film historian at Princeton.

Peter: Oh, yes. He wrote that great book, Underground Cinema?

Stephen: And here’s Priscilla Hiss, Alger's wife.

Peter: Oh, really. Wow.

Stephen: Grey, Earl of Gowrie, who I think was the chairman of Sotheby’s for a while. Many years after this.

Peter: Is that Henry Geldzahler?

Stephen: Yes.

Peter: And this person is ...

Stephen: I have no idea. This is at the Greyhound Bus depot in Oklahoma City.

Peter: There’s so much detail.

Stephen: The first photos are 35 mm, but part of my going to a larger-format camera was simply to get a larger negative. So I went to a hand-held 4 x 5 camera, a Crown Graphics. When I was photographing buildings or street corners, I would put it on a tripod, and look at the ground glass and found that I loved doing that. Then I simply made a transition from that to using an 8 x 10. My intention was simply to do the same pictures, just do them larger. And the same with people, that the portraits were going to be more dealing with the knowledge of their being photographed.

Peter: I think more than any photographer of your generation, you reinvented photography in the ’70s. I mean, in the ’80s we have another kind of photography, the kind that we see in Cindy Sherman or Richard Prince or Sherrie Levine. But now in Germany, there’s a whole generation of photographers influenced by your work. And in the U.S., there’s so much photography based on the snapshot. You introduced color and certain sociological concerns.

Stephen: Mm-hmm.

Peter: Some writers have talked about Ed Ruscha being an influence on your work.

Stephen: I guess the first time I saw Ruscha was when I was laying out my work in the Warhol Stockholm catalogue. Kaspar Koenig was involved in that, and he said, “I have this incredible thing to show you,” and he stretched out “Sunset Strip” on the floor. That must have been in ’68. Then I became more and more interested in color. I had been collecting postcards, collecting snapshots. Then, as these things happen, a very stupid, ordinary event occurred. I met a guy at a party, and he was interested that I was a photographer and wanted to see my work. I took him back to my apartment, and when I opened the box he said, “Oh, they’re black and white.” And that just sort of hit me, that here was this guy, a smart, ordinary, New York human being, who just expected that it was going to be in color. And coupled with my interest in postcards, I just said, “Okay, this is something I have to pursue.”

Peter: It was that simple.

Stephen: I got this wonderful little camera called the Rollei 35, which I guess was the predecessor of the modern point-and-shoot cameras, and decided just to get in the car and go across the country. Within a couple of days I realized that the ideas I’d had sitting in my apartment in New York had nothing to do with what I was encountering, and what I was encountering was just amazing. So I started photographing every bed I slept in, every toilet I peed in, every meal I ate, every person I met, and then photographed streets, buildings ...

Peter: One of the writers in this catalogue I just read felt that your work at that time was about an American landscape in transition, a moment between an older order and the sort of total standardization that we have today.

Stephen: Yes, I think one of the reasons I was attracted to the Southwest is that there was a mixture of this homogeneous America coming in, but also a lot of buildings of local character that had a very distinct flavor, that had a real rangy American-ness to them.

Peter: Another thing he said is that yours are the first photographs where there is no subject, where your gaze seems to just sort of land, and you’re drinking in what you’re seeing.

Stephen: I think that’s partly what I discovered in using a view camera. Because of the ground glass, because of these edges that are right there, because every decision has to be so clear, the formal issues started taking precedence in my mind. And also, because of the clarity with which an 8 x 10 renders things, the photography doesn’t have to make one particular thing the focus of the picture’s attention.

Peter: Can you talk about the light and color that you were looking at there?

Stephen: Well, one of the things color film can do is show the actual color of the light. That’s another reason I was attracted to the Southwest, because at times I wanted a certain very cool, crystalline, crisp light.

Peter: What was also really important for me when I first saw your pictures was that the 8 x 10 print was a contact print, a direct, unmediated production of the negative. Not bigger, not smaller, and done kind of mechanically — turn the thing on and turn it off.

Stephen: I go through different periods with size. But during those times that I made the contact prints, I think I liked the idea that it’s made without an enlarger. There’s a surreal density of information. It affects how time is perceived. To look at a scene like this and to record everything in your mind, there’s a sense of all of that time compressed into one glance. One of the reasons I’ve always been attracted to Vermeer is just the almost tangible force of his attention. The space of the picture is filled with his attention.

Peter: I own a few of these pictures of yours, and they’re just strange. It’s sort of like more real than the real. Now, in the mid-to-late-’70s you were associated with Light Gallery here in New York. Who were some of the photographers there at that time?

Stephen: Nick Nixon. Emmett Gowan. Garry Winogrand. Fritz Summer. Harry Callahan. Paul Strand. It was an extraordinary place. Until then, photography galleries had been ... I would call it a camera club mentality of prints. Pins and burlap on the walls. Light was the first gallery that showed photographs the way they were presented at the Modern. Freshly painted white walls, an uptown space ... And a lot of people in the photography world worked there as interns. Peter McGill was there. Marvin Heifferman.

Peter: Really. What happened to it?

Stephen: There was a big Ansel Adams show at the Modern in the late ’70s, and the prices started going up. I think the people at Light thought that although they originally had never expected to make a penny at it, that finally the world had caught up to them and their time had come. They rented a space in L.A. and spent a fortune renovating it, and took a second floor on Fifth Avenue — and nothing happened. And I think they lost a lot of money.

Peter: And closed in the early ’80s?

Stephen: Yes.

Peter: At one point there was a kind of myth that you had gone to Montana and given up photography for fly- fishing, and did this sort of Zen thing.

Stephen: It’s an exaggeration, but not too far off. [laughs] My wife and I were both interested in fly- fishing, and we spent our honeymoon in Montana, three months camping and fishing. It wasn’t a premeditated thing. We just had such a great time that we didn’t want to leave.

Peter: So you were really out in the wilderness.

Stephen: It was very dramatic. The view from my house was this valley ringed by snow-capped mountains. But it took me a couple of years of living there to understand much more the subtlety of the land. And I began also to develop an interest in how you photograph landscape and color.

Peter: I find your work from the early ’80s to the early ’90s to be some of your most sublime images. It’s like they’re formless but highly textured. You’ve changed the rules compositionally, and again you’re attacking this question that you just outlined. In a way you’d gone beyond the compositional devices you had used earlier, too.

Stephen: In the ’70s I tried to use structural devices as a way of setting up the space. There are a lot of pictures where I'm using streets or telephone poles to set up a rhythm with the frame; diagonal lines coming into the corner or just missing the corner; things jutting in from the side of the frame sometimes. One of the concerns for me in photographing the landscape is, as you move your eye along the ground, there’s a sense that you’re literally changing focus and focusing on different points further and further away.

Peter: There’s also this sense of condensation in these pictures. I don’t know, both a moment in time but also like it’s not time.

Stephen: Mm-hmm.

Peter: During this period, didn’t you also accept a commission to photograph Giverney?

Stephen: Yes. This was from the Met, which was putting on a large exhibition of Monet’s years in Giverney, and they wanted to show what the gardens looked like. But I was interested in their structure. It’s closer to an English garden, an exaggeration of nature but with an understanding of a natural order. There are scenes that you could never come upon in the wild, that kind of density of plants. But there’s something about it that feels organic.

Peter: The palette of the photographs comes from the nature of the garden itself?

Stephen: Yes. I know some people at the time complained that they weren’t colorful enough. But that also was the first time I really concentrated on a non-man-built environment. There’s a lot of pitfalls in photographing flowers in a garden. [laughs]

Peter: But in a way was it a prelude to what you would do in the west?

Stephen: I think so.

Peter: Earlier today I was looking at the pictures you took in Italy in the early to mid-’90s. These were also a commission?

Stephen: Yes, to go to this village called Latzara and take pictures. This happened to be the town in which Paul Strand did his book on the piazzas. But there was no mandate to do a photographic re-survey. They simply wanted an American who used a view camera to come and photograph the town that Paul Strand had photographed.

Peter: You did them in black and white, and I’m interested in how you feel about your newer black-and-white photographs.

Stephen: I had just done color for twenty years. If I don’t keep changing and doing new things, my life isn’t as interesting. So I decided to go to black and white. It’s taken me a while to figure out what form I want to see them in, but now I’ve started to use Iris prints, mostly three-by-four feet. Some photographs are sort of saying: “Look at this out there in the world. This is something worthy of your contemplation.” And there are other photographs that do that. I think I’m heading more toward making objects, so that’s why I’m attracted to the Iris prints. They impress themselves more as physical objects than an 8 x 10 black-and-white photograph.

Peter: You’ve also been taking black-and-white photographs of tree trunks, and what impressed me most was their extreme asceticism; that they were so without subject matter. They were tree trunks. Was this kind of invisibility of subject an issue for you?

Stephen: I would say more invisibility of approach. I’m not making romantic nature pictures. They’re very clean, very straightforward photographs. And that approach I would say holds true to the pictures of rocks I was doing.

Peter: Are you going for a kind of stylelessness in the black and white?

Stephen: That’s a way of putting it, I guess. I don’t think of it as stylelessness. I mean, I don’t even think about it. That’s just how I do them.

Peter: So, the rocks are from up in the Adirondacks.

Stephen: Yeah.

Peter: They have great rocks.

Stephen: Yes. It’s actually on a material called, I think, anarthazite, which is from very deep in the earth. Remains of the Ice Age. And there are great fields of boulders that are just in the woods.

Peter: And in a way it seems to come full circle in terms of your sociological interests. I guess the really important question is: the relationship over the years in your work between culture, pop culture, and the natural world. Do you think you started in the cultural world and you’ve moved into the natural world?

Stephen: I think so. Both in terms of where I’m living, and also my interest of the work. I think that with the landscapes in the ’80s I was progressively stripping it bare, both culturally and formally. And then since then, it’s been kind of a building up from that point. It’s just in a different way.