Stephen Shore's lenses?

[G Benaim]

I'm just getting into Shore's work, and wondered if anyone had come accross what lenses (length, primarily) he used in Uncommon Places. Thanks,

GB

[Walter Calahan]

http://www.bard.edu/academics/faculty/faculty.php?action=details&id=804

e-mail Stephen or call him.

[claudiocambon]

The introduction to the new editions describes how he went from 4x5 to 8x10 early on in the project, because color neg film in the early 70's wasn't considered to enlarge well. So you also have that distinction to factor in. I agree, email him, and I'm sure he will answer, especially if you relate it to your own specific optical needs/questions.

My guess is he used a 210 or 240 on the 8x10.

[Frank Petronio]

There is a video floating around of him with an assistant shooting one of his excruciatingly boring photos in flat light and he is using a nice 8x10 Deardorff on a Gitzo with a Rodenstock with a red-colored ring on the rim, so I guess it would be a modern Sironar-S, either a 240 or 300 based on the size. So other than the rickety old camera, he's up to speed with the latest and greatest.

(How many people can one offend in one gear-orientated post? ;-)

[venchka]

Not me. I'm so clueless I'm offend-proof. Who is this photographer? I have a Gitzo. If I buy a Deardorff for it and a big bucks high dollar lens, will anyone ask what lens or lenses I used?

Nope.

[Frank Petronio]

He is in a Northeastern clique of academic photography teachers who rode the New Topographics bandwagon of the late 1970s to minor fame and profitable gallery sales by doing cold, straight documentary photography of rural yet contemporary Americana, in his case using 8x10 color neg film, which was a bugger to deal with 30 years ago.

See Nick Nixon, Joel Sternfeld, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Robert Adams, Frank Gohke, who all mined the same themes and aped the same style. Is it any coincidence they are all MFA-college professors? (Except Adams these days)

[venchka]

Product Description
Published by Aperture in 1982 and long unavailable, Stephen Shore's legendary Uncommon Places has influenced a generation of photographers. Among the first artists to take color beyond advertising and fashion photography, Shore's large-format color work on the American vernacular landscape stands at the root of what has become a vital photographic tradition. Uncommon Places: The Complete Works presents a definitive collection of the original series, much of it never before published or exhibited. Like Robert Frank and Walker Evans before him, Shore discovered a hitherto unarticulated version of America via highway and camera. Approaching his subjects with cool objectivity, Shore's images retain precise internal systems of gestures in composition and light through which the objects before his lens assume both an archetypal aura and an ambiguously personal importance. In contrast to Shore's signature landscapes with which "Un-common Places" is often associated, this expanded survey reveals equally remarkable collections of interiors and portraits. As a new generation of artists expands on the projects of the New Topographic and New Color photographers of the seventies--Thomas Struth (whose first book was titled Unconscious Places), Andreas Gursky, and Catherine Opie among them--Uncommon Places: The Complete Works provides a timely opportunity to reexamine the diverse implications of Shore's project and offers a fundamental primer for the last thirty years of large-format color photography.

He didn't influence me and I was there the whole time. What about Elliot Porter?

Never mind.

OK, the Sambos sign is a classic clash of then and Nanny Police P.C. think now.

[Kirk Gittings]

Nick Nixon, Joel Sternfeld, Lewis Baltz, Joe Deal, Robert Adams, Frank Gohke and Steven Shore. Jeez, by and large a brilliant group of photographers who defined a generation of academic photography, not much of an accomplishment I guess. Are you kidding? Meow! You don't have to be a wannabe mimic of their style to appreciate their place in the history of contemporary art.

[D. Bryant]

and Steven Shore. Jeez, by and large a brilliant group of photographers who defined a generation of academic photography, not much of an accomplishment I guess. Are you kidding? Meow! You don't have to be a wannabe mimic of their style to appreciate their place in the history of contemporary art.

I agree with Kirk. There is a lot more going on in SHore's work than people give him credit for.

His work and others in the afore mention list of academics is worth studing. Don't look at their work expecting to see photographs like Adams or Weston.


Just my 2 cents,

Don Bryant

[pkphotog]

Stephen Shore is a self-taught photographer. In lieu of going to college he documented the scene at Andy Warhol's Factory for a number of years. You have to admire the fact that Mr. Shore knew what he wanted to do in life and did it.

[Drew Wiley]

Yeah, I own the book, Uncommon Places, have seen plenty of the contact prints up
close, basically hate his style, consider the prints mediocre at best, detest his utterly monotonous two-color palette (sickly cyan and pumpkin orange every time), and have been influenced by him zero. Nevertheless, Shore is greater than the sum of his parts and has produced some truly intriguing images. The pictures routinely
look like they were made with something in the 10-inch range on 8x10. You've got
to give some of these guys back in the 70's real credit for taking the idiosyncrasies
of the color negative film and c-paper of the era and coming up with something
truly creative. There's a fine line between flauting the characteristics of the medium
and controlling it, and Shore was a master at working with what was available.

[Frank Petronio]

Hey Kirk more power to him for getting $50K for a C-print of Rexall Drug Store. That's the free market!

I'm just saying it is a little bit of a circle jerk how the professors end up defending each other (as in this very thread itself!). Joe gets Bob his show at the University gallery and Bob is on the jury that Joe submits to... Thus you get this sort of "group think" thing going, it's like Global Warming or Nazism, everyone just accepts it at the time whether or not it's legit. Nothing all that wrong about it, it's a free country. Except a lot of worthwhile people aren't in the circle. (And nowadays the circle is filled with lesbians so it's damn hard to have that circle jerk.)

Anyway back to lenses, I always thought that Joel Myerowitz and Richard Misrach were really the best at 8x10 color and they were never a part of the New Topographics crowd.

And it is telling that so many of most of the greatest, most memorable and iconic 8x10 images in the art world were done with "normal" lenses -- 240 to 360 on 8x10.

[Mark Sampson]

Frank, you're just cranky because your pictures of tattooed bikini babes get no respect from the art world. But it's not my fault, I bought a copy of your Blurb book...
I actually saw the New Topgraphics show at the Eastman House when I was a college student. It didn't make me want to go and make photos like Shore's, but it must have had some influence. I should have bought the catalogue then.

[Frank Petronio]

Oh I spent a couple of years photographing tract homes and then graduated to drainage pipes spewing into lakes and other such things, I was very heavily influenced by it all.

Yeah I was cranky last night at 3am, sorry Stephen. I actually like some of his deadpan stuff but what the heck was up when he did that "The Gardens at Giverny" book?

[venchka]

I'm more clueless than I give myself credit for. I've never heard of any of these folks. I guess I was too busy protecting Freedom in Germany and working to pay attention. Sam Haskins got my attention.

I'll give Mr. Shore credit for working with an 8x10 camera and color negative film. Everybody back then KNEW that the real true documentary work had to be done with 35mm Nikons or Leicas and Tri-X.

Back to the original question of lens choice. Does it matter?

[Jason Greenberg Motamedi]

For what it is worth: Stephen used (when I knew him in the 1980s) a 240 G-Claron and later switched to a 240mm Sironar-S. I also recall him talking about a Goerz lens, but can't remember of it was a Dagor or a Artar.

[claudiocambon]

The problem for me isn't the deadpan quality of a lot of the work Shore and others did, but that they were followed by a whole generation of deadpan imitators who flattened out the style to zero, emulating the form, and understanding only some of the content and motivations. You see the same thing now with the Duesseldorf School. The Bechers become the Gurskys and Hoefers and Struths, who I think are pretty great (even if the restraint wears on me as a style at times), but now we are seeing endless imitations thereof, vast landscapes with tiny figures tending towards the insignificant. Again, the form is spot on, but the content often seems diluted, too far away, emotionally cowardly.

I think Shore is a genius, but I will agree with Frank that the Giverny book is not my favorite.

[pkphotog]

I think Shore is a genius, but I will agree with Frank that the Giverny book is not my favorite.

I agree with you and Frank on that one.

[QT Luong]

Nixon did some cityscapes, I'd say most of his work is about the human figure, and couldn't be further from the detachment associated with the Topographics.

Take a look at Industrial Parks and Uncommon Places. Even if they were both in the same medium (color or B/W), wouldn't you be able to identify attribute properly any of the images to the correct book ? Doesn't that tell you that even if some approaches and subjects were shared, each photographer had a unique vision. And of course Robert Adams is even more different.

[Frank Petronio]

Yes they all have their individuality, and I think Nixon essentially broke from the group once he started photographing people close enough that he could talk to them.

I did some of that "me too" work too, just another sheep, which is part of why I reject most of it too. It is just so cold. And, now that so much land has been developed and built, it's very easy to do. I basically see these pictures everyday in real life.

[QT Luong]

> it's very easy to do

The reminds me of what an painter we've been working said about abstract art: "it's all a piece of cake to do. they do that because they cannot paint". His artistic career has not been successful.

> I basically see these pictures everyday in real life.

For some reason, the art world seems to see more merit in trying to see your surroundings than in finding extraordinary sights, otherwise you'd see more National Geographic type of photography in museums.

[G Benaim]

Just to get back to the original question, Mr Shore wrote me back to answer tha 95% of Uncommon Places was shot w a 305mm lens.
Re his effect on others, etc., I know very little what his influence has been, and care less, I just like the few photos of his I've seen on the net and in books, and am getting a copy of the UP book. There's also an interview of his making the blog rounds in which he describes his working methods w an 8x10, as well as what he does now w a digital p&s.
Has anyone read his theoretical book?

[Frank Petronio]

Read? Hell no, I just bloviate.

I wonder what 305mm it was? A 12" Commercial Ektar converted to metric perhaps?

[G Benaim]

It was a g-claron.

[QT Luong]

Do you mean "The Nature of Photographs" ? If so, you don't really read it, since it doesn't have a lot of words in it for a "theoretical" book. It does make you think about many deep questions, while looking at interesting photographs, kind of like with Szarkowski's Photographer's Eye.

[Drew Wiley]

QT - A lot of the photography being pushed by museums in the 70's was a backlash to
the kind of things being done by Eliot Porter and the the other nature color photographers of the 60's. The art world is always looking for something new, and
fashion goes in style, out of style, and eventually back in again. People like Shore,
Meyerowitz, Sternfield, and Misrach were using the peculiarities of Vericolor portrait film for landscapes (versus the saturated more realistic color of dye transfer). And it
became mandatory to have pictures of suburbia, or a crushed beer can in the foreground or something. There were a lot of photographers in this genre who were
horribly pretentious, and thankfully we have forgotten the names of most. But several,
like the ones I just mentioned, managed this in a much more sophisticated manner and
have even matured. I remember going into the Grapestake Gallery in SF back then,
when these particular photographers could barely sell anything (and the gallery operated at a loss). They were wild experimenters and printed everything they shot it
seems. About 90% of it was a flop. But then a few classic images stood out and over
time they reached their stride. Meyerowitz still creates muddy unsaturated color neg
images, but in the case of his latest effort (Tuscany) has done so magnificently.
Not my style, but I do love looking at other people's work. Wish some of the digital
printers nowadays could learn the lesson of restraint in color which these particular photographers so successfully exemplified. Less can be more.

[mcfactor]

Drew, I remember us having a very similar discussion about shore's "sickly orange and blue" colors, so im not going to rehash that. All im going to say is that if you think Meyerowitz is "muddy (and) unsaturated" you might have a problem seeing color.

[Drew Wiley]

I'll stand by what I said, and I have worked as a professional color consultant. At the
time, these photographers were even labeled by art critics as the "Non-color" color photography movement. It was a common expression at that time. It's a relative expression, or course, compared to dye transfer and later, Cibachrome. As far as Shore
is concerned, every single image in Uncommon Places is based on a simultaneous
contrast between orange and cyan. If I went to a paint store and picked out two color
chips similar to this and put them on my house, the neighbors would hang me. It would
be an abominable clash unless someone were really was a master at proportionality in
the choice of hues, which Shore was. But when he published his work on Monet's Gardens it was an inevitable thud because people instinctively compared it to Monet's own polychrome vision. It didn't look like Monet's idea of a garden at all. Call this
preconception or whatever, but it was a "thud" to me too. But please recall that I
also stated that Shore is greater than the sum of his parts. And I admire a lot of work
by Meyerowitz. But all you have to do is compare his landscape work of the last
decades with his early street photography, which was sometimes printed in dye transfer, to notice a profound difference in the evolution of his personal style. Unless
you're talking certain hues of blue, Vericolor film of that era and the Kodak C paper
he printed on just didn't saturate. And that is what determined the parameters of the
game. Yes, there were a few poorly printed books which made the reds and so forth
jump off the page, but the actual prints were something else.