Stephen Shore famous quotes

04-17-2025

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

#Order #Photographer #Grammar
To see something spectacular and recognise it as a photographic possibility is not making a very big leap. But to see something ordinary, something youâ€™d see every day, and recognize it as a photographic possibility - that is what I am interested in.
-- Stephen Shore

#Ordinary #Possibility #Bigs
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
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
The context in which a photograph is seen affects the meaning the viewer draws from it.
-- Stephen Shore

#Photograph #Draws
A photograph has edges the world does not.
-- Stephen Shore

#World #Doe #Photograph
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
I do what feels natural, but I can't say I haven't thought about it..
-- Stephen Shore

#Photographer #Natural #Feels
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

#Meals #Toilets #Bed
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

#Attention #Pay #Looks
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
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
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
This idea of imposing an order is very interesting to me. Photography is in essence an analytic medium. â€¦ In photography, you start with the whole world and every decision you make imposes an order on it. The question is to what extent itâ€™s an idealized order Iâ€™m imposing or is it an order that grows out of what the world looks like.
-- Stephen Shore

#Photography #Order #Essence
I wanted to make pictures that felt natural, that felt like seeing, that didnâ€™t feel like taking something in the world and making a piece of art out of it.
-- Stephen Shore

#Art #World #Pieces
I have to be reminded, â€œâ€™Itâ€™s your sonâ€™s birthday party. Bring a camera.â€™ And then, when Iâ€™m there, â€˜Take a picture,â€™ because it doesnâ€™t occur to me to use it as this memorializing thing.
-- Stephen Shore

#Party #Son #Use
I had a creative hot streak in the 1940s and since then Iâ€™ve been pot boiling.
-- Stephen Shore

#Creative #Hot #Pot
A quote that I like very much comes close to explaining my attitude about taking photographs. â€˜Chinese poetry rarely trespasses beyond the bounds of actuality the great Chinese poets accept the world exactly as they find it in all its terms and with profound simplicity they seldom talk about one thing in terms of another; but are able enough and sure enough as artists to make the ultimately exact terms become the beautiful terms.â€™
-- Stephen Shore

#Beautiful #Attitude #Artist
Back in the 70s it cost 15-20$ a shot for the film, the processing, and the contact sheet, now itâ€™s twice that.
-- Stephen Shore

#Cost #Film #Sheets
If you've met one person with autism, you've met one person with autism.
-- Stephen Shore

#Autism #Mets #Persons

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