@stephen.shore: an ongoing archive of seeing

Abstract

Since 2014, photographer Stephen Shore has been exploring Instagram as a new body of work, having its own online portfolio entry next to iconic series as American Surfaces and Uncommon Places. Instead of joining contemporary debates concerning the crisis of representation implicit in the networked condition of the photographic image, Shore is keen to engage with Instagram through the lens of modernism, concentrating his attention on the visual characteristics intrinsic to photography as a medium, a reasoning previously encapsulated in the primer The Nature of Photographs. Building upon selected samples from Shore’s pre-digital archive in addition to his most recent series, Details, the research takes @stephen.shore as a significant case study to examine how Instagram affects the modernist emphasis on seeing photographically the ordinary, evaluating the contemporary relevance of Shore’s networked notational impulse when many Instagram users engage with photography to keep a quasi-diaristic practice. Looking at the traces of everyday life, envisaged for Instagram or the gallery wall, the camera is but a tool for reflecting upon a concept Shore long borrowed from the great writer T. S. Eliot: the “objective correlative”, allowing for poetry to be found, and given visual structure.

Acknowledgements

All referenced photographs by Stephen Shore are © Stephen Shore. Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Stephen Shore was staged at the MoMA, New York, from November 19, 2017, to May 28, 2018.

2. As each Instagram post is uploaded, it is instantly displayed on the user’s Instagram profile, all available posts sequenced in reverse chronological order. As a frame of reference, from May 21, 2014, to May 21, 2018, Shore published 1364 posts, treating @stephen.shore as a public visual archive, never deleting a single post. Of these, only 28 posts pertain to his photography archive prior to Instagram, having also shared 14 short videos, 3 screen captures, and re-shared 14 posts from other online sources; the rest 1305 Instagram posts comprising photographs made having Instagram in mind, all captured with an iPhone. While his Instagram posts often do not include any caption or searchable metadata, Shore remains keen on signaling the overall logic of his studio archive when dealing with more conventional display contexts. For example, in the catalogue accompanying his retrospective at MoMA, all photography samples from @stephen.shore are captioned with the same attention to detail (location and date) as all the other projects. See Bajac, Stephen Shore.

3. Rubinstein, “What is 21st Century Photography?”

4. Shore, The Nature of Photographs. A primer on the visual language of photography in the lineage of The Photographer’s Eye, the landmark book by John Szarkowski, photographer and influential director of MoMA’s Department of Photography from 1962 to 1991, and a crucial figure guiding Shore’s creative path from an early age.

5. Crimp, “The Museum’s Old,” 6.

6. John Szarkowski’s introductory essay for The Photographer’s Eye remains an iconic manifesto of late modernist convictions: “For the artist photographer, much of his sense of reality (where his picture starts) and much of his sense of craft or structure (where his picture is completed) are anonymous and untraceable gifts from photography itself.” Szarkowski, The Photographer’s Eye, 11.

7. Roughly a year after making his first post, @stephen.shore already had over 41 thousand followers. Although a plethora of online resources claim to provide effective workflows for gaining traction on Instagram, the road to online popularity remains elusive, especially for someone like Shore, who, as will be described below, operates with no strategic concern besides the pleasure of sharing with others his notational impulse. Given Shore’s unpretentious take on Instagram—evidencing nevertheless a strong visual consistency and regularity in posting, which are often cited factors for gaining Instagram followers—the steadily growing popularity of @stephen.shore may derive to a certain extent from the constancy of his public exposure. Besides teaching and regularly giving lectures, interviews and taking part on round-table discussions, Shore staged a retrospective exhibition that toured major institutions in Europe from late 2014 to late 2016, and also took part on several important group exhibitions⁠, in each occasion likely stimulating further interest on his work among the generic public, coupled with the more focused audience that already follows his career and the network of professional contacts and students/colleagues that from time to time interact with his posts. The more impressive boost in terms of Instagram exposure arguably took place during the following retrospective staged at MoMA, extensively featured in the media with mentions to Shore’s Instagram explorations, having amassed around 42 thousand followers from November 2017 to May 2018, reaching over 144 thousand followers. For a list of exhibitions, see Bajac, Stephen Shore, 301–9.

8. Shore, Instagram, August 22, 2017. All dates referring to Instagram posts correspond to the day the photograph was uploaded to Instagram according to the standard Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

9. The famous expression celebrated by photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson.

10. Shore, interview by Lynne Tillman, 179.

11. Shore, interview by Alexis Dahan.

12. Shore, “Dallas, Texas, June 1972.”

13. Shore, interview by Katherine Oktober Matthews (emphasis in original).

14. Shore, “Perrine, Florida.”

15. Shore, “Stephen Shore | HOW.”

16. Virilio and Walker, “Virilio on Georges Perec,” 17.

17. Shore, Instagram, February 18, 2018.

18. Ibid. For additional relevant comments see Shore, Instagram, November 11, 2015; Shore, Instagram, February 25, 2016.

19. Shore was an early advocate of color film, looking at American culture alongside photographers as William Eggleston, Mitch Epstein, Joel Meyerowitz and Joel Sternfeld. Major retrospective exhibitions as The New Color: A Decade of Color Photography, curated by Sally Euclaire, and Starburst: Color Photography in America 1970–1980, curated by Kevin Moore, put in evidence how the controversy with color had largely dissipated over the following decade.

20. Bajac, “Color,” 64.

21. As noted by Britt Salvesen: “While recalling [Walker] Evans’s American Photographs in its title and scope, Shore’s American Surfaces exhibition was closer to [Ed] Ruscha and [Robert] Venturi in presentation.” Salvesen, “New Topographics,” 28 (emphasis in original).

22. Besides discussing Instagram in several public talks and interviews, @stephen.shore is featured in Shore’s website and in the accompanying catalogue to the recent retrospective exhibition staged at MoMA.

23. Fontcuberta, “Introduction: An Infinite Gaze,” 6.

24. See note 7 above.

25. In an additional remark posted online: “I don’t photograph the ordinary just because it’s ordinary. I look for moments of vividness. Sometimes the ordinary is the strongest template on which to communicate the experience seeing the world with heightened attention.” Shore, Instagram, April 22, 2017.

26. Muellner, “The New Interval,” 75.

27. Shore, Instagram, April 30, 2016. Shore extends on this perception in the interview with Tom McGlynn: “It’s not like looking at an 8 × 10 because you do see the whole frame, but it is like using a view camera because it’s not an extension of your eye, you’re not looking through the camera. (…) It communicates a self-awareness that this is not the photograph as a representation of that object, but a photograph as representation of my vision, my seeing that object.” Shore, interview by Tom McGlynn (emphasis in original).

28. See note 26 above, 78–79 (emphasis in original).

29. Upon the transition to digital photography Shore has maintained a similar degree of intentionality: “When I use a digital camera, I essentially use it the way I use an 8x10, which is, I take one picture of everything, unless something is in motion.” See note 13 above.

30. Shore has also maintained the discipline of taking photographs according to the non-hierarchical nature of the square ratio. In a reply to a comment on @stephen.shore: “I had never produced a body of work in that format, which looks great on IG, and thought the discipline of using it would shake up my seeing.” Shore, Instagram, December 28, 2016.

31. Stylistic traits such as the color tonality of Kodacolor film and the lighting effect of the on-camera flash are absent on Shore’s “no-filter” approach to Instagram. The photographer is keen on limiting his workflow to available lighting conditions, applying only basic exposure adjustments to the original digital capture. In his own words: “It’s seeing more than post processing.” See note 25 above.

32. Sontag, “On style,” 17.

33. William Jenkins used this problematic expression in the introductory essay to the catalogue accompanying the landmark exhibition NEW TOPOGRAPHICS: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape. For a comprehensive overview, see note 21 above, 49–55.

34. Shore is known to acknowledge Walker Evans as his major influence in photography. See, for example, Bajac, “Evans, Walker,” 92.

35. Evans, interview by Leslie Katz, 364.

36. Shore, interview by Tom McGlynn.

37. See note 21 above, 28.

38. Following the modernist ethos of the artist’s temperament, the reflections on the meaning of the contemporary by Giorgio Agamben may prove useful to frame Shore’s transition from American Surfaces to Instagram: “Contemporariness is, then, a singular relationship with one’s own time, which adheres to it and, at the same time, keeps a distance from it. More precisely, it is that relationship with time that adheres to it through a disjunction and an anachronism. Those who coincide too well with the epoch, those who are perfectly tied to it in every respect, are not contemporaries, precisely because they do not manage to see it; they are not able to firmly hold their gaze on it.” Agamben, “What is an Apparatus?” 41 (emphasis in original).

39. According to Lev Manovich, the “anti-selfie” is characterized by including parts of the photographer’s own body within the frame while excluding the face, a photographic strategy preceding mobile media photography as evidenced, for example, in the cover of Shore’s primer, The nature of Photographs, featuring a work by Kenneth Josephson. See Tifentale, “Competitive Photography,” 179–183.

40. The Polaroid SX-70 was not the first mass-marketed instant camera model, but it constituted an exponent of “absolute one-step photography” envisioned by Polaroid’s inventor Edwin H. Land.

41. WNYC, “Polaroids by Walker Evans.”

42. Tormey, “Walker Evans’s ‘Counter-Aesthetic.’”

43. Shore, “Instagram.”

44. Shore, Instagram, August 25, 2017.

45. Details was exhibited at the 303 Gallery from January 11 to February 17, 2018, concurrently with the retrospective at the MoMA.

46. 303 Gallery, “STEPHEN SHORE.”

47. The Hasselblad X1D camera body is the size of a small format rangefinder, featuring an electronic viewfinder and a rear LCD touchscreen interface for previewing and taking photographs. Its 50 megapixels digital CMOS sensor allows an image resolution of 8272 × 6200 pixels.

48. See note 36 above.

49. Ibid.

50. See note 46 above.

51. Bajac, “Solving Pictures,” 10.

52. Rancière, Aisthesis, X. Tom Holert formulated an insightful approach based on Rancière’s “Aisthesis” on the work of Wolfgang Tillmans, another contemporary exponent of a disarming photographic discourse attentive to the ordinary. See Holert, “The Unforeseen,” 6–7.

53. Documentum, “About.”

54. See note 13 above.

55. Rubinstein, “A Life More Photographic,” 23.

56. Ibid., 9.

57. Tifentale, “Rules of the Photographers’ Universe,” 76–77.

58. Ibid., 76.

59. Osborne, The Postconceptual Condition, 139.

60. See note 3 above.

61. See note 4 above, 10.

62. Steyerl, “In Defense.”

63. Manovich, Instagram and Contemporary Image, 41 (emphasis in original).

64. When informed during an interview about Facebook having non-exclusive, full usage rights over his posts, Shore nevertheless stressed his interest in being part of Instagram. In his own words: “It won’t stop me, though”. See note 11 above.

65. See note 2 above.

66. Ghel, “The archive and the processor,” 1229.

67. As Mike Featherstone reminds us, “Life increasingly becomes lived in the shadow of the archive”. Featherstone, “Archive”, 591.

68. See note 62 above, 41.

69. Ibid., 42.

70. As stressed by Daniel Rubinstein, “21^st Century Photography is not the representation of the world, but the exploration of the labor practices that shape this world through mass-production, computation, self-replication and pattern recognition. Through it we come to understand that the ‘real world’ is nothing more than so much information plucked out of chaos (…) In photography one can glimpse how the accidental meetings of these forces are capable of producing temporary, meaningful assemblages that we call ‘images’.” See note 3 above.

71. Dewdney, “Co-creating in the Networks.”

72. Ibid.

73. Reference to the title of the seminal exhibition We Are All Photographers Now! staged at the Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, from October 13, 2007, to January 31, 2008.

74. See note 11 above.

75. McLuhan, Understanding Media, Introduction to the Second Edition.

76. Salzman, “Sharing Makes the Picture,” 232.

77. Holert, “The Unforeseen,” 6.

78. See note 36 above.

79. See note 3 above.

80. Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 116–125. As noted by Rancière: “what confers its pictorial virtue on the photograph of the Alabama kitchen (…) is a change of status in the relations between thought, art, action and image. This change marks the transition from a representative regime of expression to an aesthetic regime. (…) it is not the abolition of the image in direct presence, but its emancipation from the unifying logic of action; it is not a rupture in the relationship between the intelligible and the sensible, but a new status for the figure. (…) The power of transformation of the banal into the impersonal, forged by literature, comes to hollow out the seeming obviousness, the seeming immediacy, of the photo from within. The pensiveness of the image is then the latent presence of one regime of expression in another.”

81. Ibid., 131–2.

82. See note 13 above.

83. Steyerl, “Proxy Politics,” 38. Preceding this remark: “An image becomes less a representation than a proxy, a mercenary of appearance, a floating texture-surface-commodity. (…) As humans feed affect, thought, and sociality into algorithms, algorithms feed back into what used to be called subjectivity.”

84. In this regard, Jacques Derrida’s reflections on the written word and the archive remind us how “the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future. The archivization produces as much as it records the event.” Derrida, Archive Fever, 17 (emphasis in original).

85. See note 13 above.

86. See note 46 above.

87. Shore, “Objective Correlative,” 172.

88. Osborne, Anywhere or Not at All, 125.

89. See note 62 above, 44.

90. See note 57 above, 68–77.

91. Shore, Instagram, July 28, 2015.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia under [Grant number SFRH/BD/123122/2016].

Notes on contributors

Cláudio Reis

Cláudio Reis is a PhD Candidate in Digital Media, University of Porto, Portugal, a collaborative framework with the University of Texas at Austin, USA, with a research focused on the contemporary photographic practices on Instagram. In tandem to his academic profile, he is a visual artist engaging with photography. Instagram: @umclaudio.