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.
I always wanted to be an artist, writer and poet since I was seven, and one has to live long enough to evolve as an artist and do one's finest work.
I find the greatest songs in the world come out of pain, and I don't like it! Here's what it does: It strips away all of your facade. It makes you so honest. It's cleansing.
We worked the medley on side two of "Abbey Road" out carefully in advance. All of those mini songs were partly completed tunes; some were written while we were in India a year before. So there was just a bit of chorus here and a verse there. We welded them all together into a routine.
I'll keep on acting 'til they wipe the drool. I like the business. I like to do different parts and diverse characters. I haven't lost my enthusiasm yet!
To evade such temptations is the first duty of the poet. For as the ear is the antechamber to the soul, poetry can adulterate and destroy more surely then lust or gunpowder. The poet's, then, is the highest office of all. His words reach where others fall short. A silly song of Shakespeare's has done more for the poor and the wicked than all the preachers and philanthropists in the world.
There are no limits to what kind of bodies, which types of people, which genders, or what races can do amazing drag, and I think the audience is clamoring fighting with each other more and more to see drag represented as fully as it possibly can be.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.