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.
Interpretation
Photography requires a systematic approach to create meaningful images, similar to how grammar structures a sentence.
In this quote, Stephen Shore emphasizes the importance of order and structure in photography. Just as sentences need grammatical rules to convey clear meaning, photographs require compositional elements to effectively communicate ideas, emotions, or narratives. Without these structures, a photograph fails to resonate or make sense, much like a jumbled collection of words that lacks coherence.
In practice
This quote could be used in a photography workshop to highlight the significance of composition.
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.
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.
A photograph has edges the world does not.
Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.
Whenever you listen to a piece of music, what you are actually doing is hearing the latest sentence in a very long story you’ve been listening to - all the pieces of music you’ve ever heard.
[Photography] puts a human face on issues which, from afar, can appear abstract or ideological or monumental in their global impact.
The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.
And I don't feel any form of music is beyond me in the sense of that I don't understand it or I don't have some love for some part of it.
The movie, by sheer speeding up of the mechanical, carried us from the world of sequence and connections into the world of creative configurations and structure.
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