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Gil Blank Interviews Stephen Shore
GIL BLANK: I want to ask you about your use of portraiture in Uncommon Places, which has always seemed to me to be its most problematic aspect. If we’re to consider at least one chief aspect of the project as the attempt at a rigorous analysis of pictorial space, and that act itself of constructing such a hermetic and evacuated space as an emblematic parallel to a thoroughly disillusioned model of subjectivity, what possible value could a portrait practice have within that, projecting as it does such hopes of the essentializing and consummating moment? STEPHEN SHORE: It’s a complicated issue. Let me give you a couple of different answers. First, in formal terms, it’s a different kind of subject.American Surfaces, for instance, which also used portraiture as one of its several motifs, had a different kind of balance between people, objects, and places than Uncommon Places did, which is much more architecture-oriented. I may be wrong, but if you were to take those architectural pictures out of it, and were left with food and objects, the people might fit in more. It’s because it’s a more singular subject and not a scene that it calls forth different formal solutions. But that’s not addressing the deeper question you’re asking. When I look at a photographic portrait, I don’t believe that I can draw any true conclusion about the person being photographed. I can have responses to the image; I can have thoughts and feelings about it, in the same way that I would have thoughts and feelings about a fictional character. That could even be very interesting. But in reading a novel, for example, I don’t mistake the character for being a real person. I think an interesting example of this is Intimate Enemy, a book that the photographer Robert Lyons did. He had access to prisons in Rwanda. He photographed both perpetrators and survivors of the genocide. Some of the portraits project that quality of presumptive wisdom that Paul Strand might have tried to get; they have the photographic signs that we’re culturally cued to pick up on, like the look in the eye, the wrinkles on the face. And then you’ll find out that this person is in fact a monster. I’d say then that I see portraits as visual fictions. When I take a portrait, I have to be aware of how this expression is going to look out of the context of time, frozen into this moment, and how it could be read. But here’s the thing: That doesn’t mean that at the same time I can’t bring my own perceptions to bear and attempt to see something in that person. So I’m not in fact completely denying the old-fashioned notion of the portrait. I know enough about photography though to know that as a viewer of a portrait, I can’t then take what I see in the portrait and make judgments about the person shown. Having said that, here’s the confusing factor. Tod Papageorge, who’s an old friend, came out to Berkeley, where my wife Ginger and I were getting married, and he photographed our wedding. It was in the backyard of a house we were renting in Berkeley. And other than Henry Wessel, Tod didn’t know anyone there. But he took pictures of these people who are friends of mine, and I look at the pictures today and I think, “Gosh, Tod really got them. This is such a typical moment of this person; there’s something of this person’s personality that Tod really captured again and again and again.” And that confuses things, particularly in light of the Rwanda monsters. There’s a picture in Uncommon Places of a couple from Oregon, the Wehrlys. He’s a guy with white hair and a beard, and his wife is looking at him, with her arm on him, and there’s a kind of tenderness between them, and he looks like a profound person. As I recall, he was an alcoholic who had nothing particularly interesting to say. He just looked a certain way. Who knows why she looked at him in that way at that moment? I’m taking a picture out of a flow of events. For me there aren’t any simple answers to that; there are many layers.
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Preserving the Deranged Infrastructure of Google Earth
Clement Valla is an artist and coder fascinated by the processes that “produce unfamiliar artifacts and skew reality” Not in the primary race, but in things like Google Earth, where he enjoys discovering aberrant digital phenomena before they get corrected by humans.
(Source: motherboard.vice.com)
