A photograph has edges the world does not.
Interpretation
Photography captures a unique perspective of the world, framing moments that may otherwise go unnoticed.
This quote by Stephen Shore highlights the artistic nature of photography, suggesting that a photograph can capture and define a moment in a way that reality does not. The 'edges' refer to both the literal borders of a photograph and the metaphorical boundaries created by the photographer's perspective, allowing for a distinct interpretation of life that may not be present in everyday experience.
In practice
During a photography workshop, you could use this quote to emphasize the importance of perspective.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
First of all, to do performance art, you really have to give 100 percent. I only know that I have to give 100 percent and then what happens, happens.
I am never going to write for the sake of writing.
I think something that every actor wants, whether they've done four movies or forty movies, is they want to find the work interesting. You want to come to work and think this is going to be a challenge.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of the night.
We hated Bauhaus. It was a bad time in architecture. They just didn’t have any talent. All they had were rules. Even for knives and forks they created rules. Picasso would never have accepted rules. The house is like a machine? No! The mechanical is ugly. The rule is the worst thing. You just want to break it.
Colors are the deeds/ and sufferings of light.
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