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.
Interpretation
The quote highlights a shift in motivation among artists from a pursuit of understanding to a focus on commercial success.
In this quote, Stephen Shore reflects on his experiences with young artists, noting that many seem primarily driven by the desire to achieve recognition in prestigious venues like Chelsea galleries. He contrasts this with his own journey as an artist, where his focus was on deepening his understanding of photography, the world, and himself, suggesting that a genuine quest for knowledge and self-exploration is more valuable than the pursuit of fame or commercial success.
In practice
In an art class, discussing the deeper motivations behind creating artwork.
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.
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.
It so happened that Lucy, who found daily life rather chaotic, entered a more solid world when she opened the piano. She was then no longer either deferential or patronizing; no longer either a rebel or a slave.
I'm a great poet. I don't put my poems on paper: they consist of actions and feelings.
I often feel like a nutty professor, like I'm going to try this experiment and see if it works. My hypothesis is, people in the West can absorb African women stories without any shaken or stirred mixer. It can come directly from the source.
Hip Hop was supposed to be this new thing that had no boundaries and was so different to everyday music. As long as it has soul to it, hip hop can live on.
I'm one of those people who says, 'yes, cinema died when they invented sound.'
Be a good craftsman; it won't stop you from being a genius.
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