Stephen Shore Quotes

Quotes about:

• To see something spectacular and recognise it as a photographic possibility is not making a very big leap. But to see something ordinary, something you’d see every day, and recognize it as a photographic possibility - that is what I am interested in.

  Stephen Shore

  Photography, Vision, Ordinary

  "Stephen Shore's best shot" by Leo Benedictus, www.theguardian.com. September 26, 2007.

  66 Copy quote

• Photographers have to impose order, bring structure to what they photograph. It is inevitable. A photograph without structure is like a sentence without grammar-it is incomprehensible, even inconceivable.

  Stephen Shore

  Photography, Order, Photographer

  63 Copy quote

• I wanted to make pictures that felt natural, that felt like seeing, that didn’t feel like taking something in the world and making a piece of art out of it.

  Stephen Shore

  Art, Pieces, World

  39 Copy quote

• A photograph has edges the world does not.

  Stephen Shore

  Doe, World, Photograph

  Stephen Shore (2007). “The nature of photographs”, Phaidon Inc Ltd

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• I think most serious photographers understand that there's this large gap between the world and how the world looks through a photograph.

  Stephen Shore

  Thinking, Looks, World

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• If you've met one person with autism, you've met one person with autism.

  Stephen Shore

  Autism, Mets, Persons

  37 Copy quote

• The context in which a photograph is seen affects the meaning the viewer draws from it.

  Stephen Shore

  Photograph, Draws, Viewers

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• Photography is inherently an analytic discipline. Where a painter starts with a blank canvas and builds a picture, a photographer starts with the messiness of the world and selects a picture. A photographer standing before houses and streets and people and trees and artifacts of a culture imposes an order on the scene - simplifies the jumble by giving it structure. He or she imposes this order by choosing a vantage point, choosing a frame, choosing a moment of exposure, and by selecting a plane of focus.

  Stephen Shore

  Photography, Art, Creativity

  Stephen Shore (2007). “The nature of photographs”, Phaidon Inc Ltd

  30 Copy quote

• I discovered that this camera was the technical means in photography of communicating what the world looks like in a state of heightened awareness. And it's that awareness of really looking at the everyday world with clear and focused attention that I'm interested in.

  Stephen Shore

  Photography, Mean, Everyday

  25 Copy quote

• With a painting, you're taking basic building blocks and making something that's more complex than what you started with. It is a synthetic process. A photograph does the opposite: It takes the world, and puts an order on it, simplifies it.

  Stephen Shore

  Photography, Block, Order

  "On The Nature of Photographs February 20th, 2015". Interview with Luc Sante, aperture.org. February 20, 2015.

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• I don't have to have a single point of emphasis in the picture. It can be complex, because it's so detailed that the viewer can take time and read it, and look at something here, and look at something there, and they can pay attention to a lot more.

  Stephen Shore

  Looks, Attention, Pay

  16 Copy quote

• There's something arbitrary about taking a picture. So I can stand at the edge of a highway and take one step forward and it can be a natural landscape untouched by man and I can take one step back and include a guardrail and change the meaning of the picture radically... I can take a picture of a person at one moment and make them look contemplative and photograph them two seconds later and make them look frivolous.

  Stephen Shore

  Photography, Art, Creativity

  16 Copy quote

• A work can do many things at once, and it doesn't have to be just about the world, it could also be about photography, it could be about perception, it could be an exploration of the medium. It could be a document, it could be a visual poetry, and it could be a formal exploration all at the same time.

  Stephen Shore

  Photography, Perception, World

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  11 Copy quote

• This idea of imposing an order is very interesting to me. Photography is in essence an analytic medium. … In photography, you start with the whole world and every decision you make imposes an order on it. The question is to what extent it’s an idealized order I’m imposing or is it an order that grows out of what the world looks like.

  Stephen Shore

  Photography, Order, Essence

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• The danger is that you can wind up doing tourist pictures. I want to see it fresh and see the little bits of everyday life that a native might take for granted, but that are special to the place, while at the same time, not taking a picture that would be a tourist cliché.

  Stephen Shore

  Wind, Everyday, Special

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

  11 Copy quote

• I'm always interested in finding new aesthetic problems to deal with and challenge myself, even if the aesthetic problem is one of content.

  Stephen Shore

  Challenges, Problem, Aesthetic

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• A lot of the photography I'm doing and thinking about is directed at Instagram.

  Stephen Shore

  Photography, Thinking, Instagram

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• As not a native, I have the advantage of not seeing scenes habitually. I can see things fresh.

  Stephen Shore

  Scene, Advantage, Native

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I was photographing every meal I ate, every person I met, every waiter or waitress who served me, every bed I slept in, every toilet I used.

  Stephen Shore

  Bed, Meals, Toilets

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• I think I misunderstood Instagram and just thought it was people photographing their friends, and discovered there were a number of people, a number of artists, who were taking it very seriously and doing very imaginative work with Instagram as the medium.

  Stephen Shore

  Artist, Thinking, Numbers

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I do what feels natural, but I can't say I haven't thought about it.

  Stephen Shore

  Photographer, Natural, Feels

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• Why can't a photograph be all four things at once? -be an art object; be a document, what ever that means exactly, but deal with content; be a formalist exploration; and operate on some, metaphor is not the right word but, resonant level.

  Stephen Shore

  Art, Mean, Levels

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• I know that people think of my work from the '70s as American, but I've been going to other places for a long time.

  Stephen Shore

  Thinking, Long, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• There's something essentially fictive about a photograph. That doesn't mean that if you understand that, and you understand how the world is transformed by the camera, that you can't use the limitations or the transformation to have an observation that is a very subtle perception of the world.

  Stephen Shore

  Mean, Perception, Cameras

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I meet young artists and it becomes clear that with some the main motivation is getting a show in Chelsea. It strikes me that this is very different to the way it was for me, which was that I wanted to understand photography and the world and myself.

  Stephen Shore

  Photography, Motivation, Artist

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