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.
Interpretation
Stephen Shore emphasizes creating art that reflects genuine experiences rather than merely converting reality into an artwork.
In this quote, Stephen Shore expresses his desire to create photographs that resonate with the viewer's perceptions of reality. He aims for his art to encapsulate the essence of seeing and experiencing the world, rather than just a mechanical representation of it. This idea highlights the artist's intent to evoke an authentic feeling from the viewer, bridging the gap between art and reality.
In practice
During an art gallery opening to discuss the intention behind each piece.
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.
A photograph has edges the world does not.
To be willing to sort of die in order to move the reader, somehow. Even now I'm scared about how sappy this'll look in print, saying this.
The music can tell people everything they need to know about being human beings. It's not my information, it's not mine. I didn't make it. I just discovered it.
Being a singer is a natural gift. It means I'm using to the highest degree possible the gift that god gave me to use. I'm happy with that.
Emerald as heavy as a golf course, ruby as dark as an afterbirth, diamond as white as sun on the sea.
I can't read novels while I'm writing a novel, because somebody's voice creeps in.
Graffiti ultimately wins out over proper art because it becomes part of your city, it' s a tool; "I'll meet you in that pub, you know, the one opposite that wall with a picture of a monkey holding a chainsaw". I mean, how much more useful can a painting be than that?
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