An uncommon eye on America

VISUAL ARTS: Stephen Shore Photographs Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin Mon-Fri 11am-6pm, Thurs 11am-7pm, Sat 11am-4.45pm Until July 7

IN 1982, Aperture published a book of photographs by Stephen Shore titled

Uncommon Places

. It comprised 40 or so colour plates, made with a large format camera and documenting stages of a journey through the vernacular American landscape. On the face of it a deadpan if visually astute exploration of the ordinary, the book nonetheless proved to be a landmark publication, and the work it featured can claim a large share of the responsibility for setting contemporary art photography on a new course. The Douglas Hyde Gallery’s outstanding exhibition,

Stephen Shore

, features works from

Uncommon Places

as well as from

American Surfaces

, which preceded it, and the more recent

New York Intersections

.

Shore was born in New York city in 1947 and took up photography at an early age. When he was just 14 he famously wrote to the celebrated photographer Edward Steichen, who was MoMA’s curator of photography, and asked him to look at his work. Steichen obliged, and bought several prints from him. During the 1960s, Shore met Andy Warhol and took to hanging around the Factory, documenting the lively scene at the studio. Then, in 1972, he set out on a road trip to Amarillo, Texas, with a friend. As he later put it himself, he’d lived most of his life until then within the few square miles of Manhattan: “I didn’t drive, so my first view of America was framed by the passenger’s window. It was a shock.” In the great American tradition, his work was shaped by a road trip, and road trips substantially occupied the next decade of his life. He photographed the meals he ate, the places he stayed in, the people he was with and the people he encountered, the towns and cities he visited, all with intense and open curiosity. He worked first with a 35mm camera and then, when he became dissatisfied with the quality of the enlarge- ments, moved onto an old 4x5 press camera.

It was often better, he found, to use a tripod with this camera. Soon he was using a tripod all the time, and then he thought, well, if he was using a tripod, he could use an 8X10 camera – that’s eight inches by 10 inches, by the way — and have even larger, much more detailed negatives. Shooting on such a scale greatly influenced the way he framed his photographs. The process was much slower and more considered, and not only because every single negative was relatively expensive. He could see the image he was composing in great detail in the full-size ground glass viewer that, in a large format camera, takes the place of a viewfinder. A contact print from an 8x10 negative contains, as he put it, a “surreal density” of visual information.

American Surfaces, in many respects a preparatory study for Uncommon Places, is well named, for what sets Shore's work apart was that he tries to look at things as they are, rather than in terms of a received pictorial tradition. And he pointed his camera at subjects we might habitually overlook, such as a freshly served breakfast in a diner, or an advertising billboard, or a garage forecourt. His cool, dispassionate way of looking at familiar, perhaps overly familiar, aspects of the world, allows us to see them afresh. It de-familiarises them, as Mark Haworth-Booth notes in the show's catalogue.

In that sense, Uncommon Places,is an equally apposite title, because the commonplace is made uncommon by his way of seeing and depicting it. The original book is largely devoted, he noted, to "architecture and intersections", to fragments of everyday streetscapes. When Andrew Hiller, an editor at Aperture, approached him about doing a revised, expanded version of Uncommon Placesat the turn of the century, he jumped at the chance. The result, published in 2004, adds The Complete Worksto the original title and another 100 or so photographs to the original 40.

Having the additions vastly outnumbering the originals might sound like taking the phenomenon of the director's cut to ridiculous lengths, but in fact it isn't. Although he'd concluded Uncommon Placesas a project in 1981, Shore knew that he had a substantial body of additional material – thousands of photographs in fact – much of which should logically be included. The economics of colour reproduction and publishing had moved on since the original publication as, indeed, had his own standing in photographic history. One significant effect of the expansion is that it broadens the reach of the original, expanding on the nature of the subject matter, admitting many interiors, portraits and still lifes which, Shore feels, amounts to a more accurate account of what he was doing. It also makes it clear that it is directly derived from the earlier American Surfaces.

In time, Shore and his wife moved to Montana. He took up fly-fishing. He began to photograph landscapes – wild, natural landscapes rather than townscapes. Landscapes from Montana, Texas and Scotland are included in the exhibition. His approach is striking. It is as if he is at pains to exclude any aspect of the conventionally picturesque, and yet to invest each image with that “surreal density” of information. The level of detail and the absence of a central, defining motif draws the eye into examining each photograph carefully, inviting us to think about what it is we are looking at.

The black-and-white photographs of pedestrians in New York have a panoramic, cinematic feeling. Shore achieved this by halving the size of the 8x10 negatives, making 4x10 images. Greatly enlarged, they evoke wide-screen movies and somehow the still images uncannily manage to capture a sense of edgy move- ment, the busy unpredictability of the city pavement and the stop-start rhythm of traffic. PhotoIreland 2010, the first festival of its kind in Ireland, takes place at more than 20 venues in Dublin from July 1st-12th. Not only does the Hyde’s Stephen Shore represent the ideal pre- cursor, it’s hard to imagine that you’ll see anything better or more thought-provoking in the festival.