To make all my decisions conscious, I started filling the pictures with attention.
Just the way when an actor who's trained to move in a completely natural way fills the
theater with the presence of attention.
I'm Stephen Shore.
I'm a photographer, and this is an exhibition of my work at the Museum of Modern Art.
It covers about 50 years of my work and career.
This is a room of black and white work I did when I was a teenager.
When I was 17, I met Andy Warhol, and asked if I could come to his studio to photograph.
And as soon as I went there, I realized that that was more interesting than going to high
school.
So this is what I did instead of going to college, I spent three years on and off photographing
at the Factory.
This picture was made probably within the first week or two of my going to the factory.
And it's a picture of me and Andy, and I guess it could go down in history as my first selfie.
Yes.
This is a film called "Elevator."
I made it when I was, I guess, about 16.
And it was shown at a theater in New York called the Filmmakers' Cinematheque the same
night that Andy premiered one of his movies, "The Life of Juanita Castro."
And that's how I was introduced to Andy.
In the early '70s, in 1970 and '71, I became very interested in the vernacular uses of
photography.
I began using color.
Because all snapshots were in color, all postcards were in color, television was, movies were.
But art photography was this one holdout.
Art photography was always in black and white.
And it was a convention that I didn't understand, and I think there's something in me that just
likes to question visual conventions.
Which brings us to this room.
This is a recreation of a show that I put on in New York called "American Surfaces."
It was a gallery named LIGHT Gallery.
And it was hung just as these are.
And one thing I wanted to do was to take pictures that felt like they were not burdened with
visual conventions.
I want to take pictures that felt like seeing.
Just the way when people write they use a different language than they use when they
speak.
The language may be a little more stilted.
It may be a little more formal.
And I wanted to get to that quality of speaking.
So what I would do as an exercise is in various moments during the day, at random moments,
I would become aware of my field of vision.
To put it in modern terms, it would be like taking a screenshot of my field of vision.
And I did this so I could see what it was like to see what the experience I was seeing
looked like.
And I used that as a guide in how I made my pictures.
So I chose this one as an example of what I was saying because it doesn't stand out
as a highly charged event.
It's something you might see during the day.
And I think it's also an example of seeing it the way an eye would see it.
That the lines are not aligned.
That the water fountain is placed in the center.
There was a visual convention at the time that you don't put the subject of the picture
in the center, which runs completely counter to how we see, because you always are looking
at your subject.
After I finished the series "American Surfaces," I started using a view camera.
These are big cameras on a tripod.
Just like the cameras that were used in the 19th century, where the camera's on a tripod
and you go under a dark cloth to focus.
One thing that I noticed right away using the view camera, because the images are so
highly detailed, there are little things in the picture that I can see that I don't have
to make the subject of the picture.
So for example, if you look closely in this scene, there's a window.
And in the window is a boy, and his breath is on the glass.
Where "American Surfaces" were about the act of seeing almost as though one's seeing through
my eyes.
In "Uncommon Places," I'm often relying on the descriptive power of the camera to make
a complex picture that the viewer moves their attention through.
So what I'm doing is creating a small world for a viewer to explore, rather than the impression
of what it's like to look through my eyes.
One thing I've always been interested in is what the world looks like when it's seen when
you're in a state of heightened awareness.
Those moments which I think everyone has where experience feels more tangible.
Where experience feels more vivid.
And as you walk down the street with that frame of mind, relationships begin to stand
out.
Let's go to this picture.
This is a picture I made in 1975 at the intersection of Beverly and La Brea in Los Angeles.
And I think it represents the height of structural density in my work, where I'm looking at every
visual relationship in the picture.
I'm looking at the relationship of this to this, of this to this, of this to this, of
this to this all throughout the picture.
And so, this is structurally about as dense as any picture I made.
In the process of becoming aware of all the structural elements of a picture, to make
all my decisions conscious, I started filling the pictures with attention.
And so, although this seems as casual and as natural as an "American Surfaces" picture,
the difference is for me, there's a resonance of conscious attention that fills the picture.
Just the way when an actor who's trained to move in a completely natural way, who can
walk across a stage without apparent self-consciousness, fills the theater with the presence of attention.
What would be called "stage presence."
And this would be the visual equivalent of stage presence.
In 1980, my wife and I moved to Montana.
And when I started living there and thinking about what to photograph, I realized that
if I photographed the land, I would be seeing it through the eyes of a New Yorker, and taking
pictures that essentially said, "Wow.
Isn't this beautiful?"
And that those pictures would have missed something that I would be doing if I were
photographing in the city or a small town.
And that is, they wouldn't be expressing a perception of the place.
It wouldn't be expressing a subtle perception of the place.
And so, I took this as my next objective to understand landscape photography.
And so, I lived there for two years, seeing land in different light, becoming familiar
with it.
Developing those perceptions, hiking on it, until a point about two years later where
I felt that I had the perceptions I needed to begin to make what, to me, would be interesting
photographs.
One lingering question I had after my formal explorations of the '70s was could I go to
a flat, open piece of land that didn't have streets that defined one point perspective?
That didn't have telephone poles to emphasize the frame?
That it was just an open piece of land and treeless piece of land, and figure out how
to make it look like deep space receding?
As you move your attention from the foreground all the way back without skipping over anything,
back to the horizon, you may have a sensation of your eye changing focus.
But this is an illusion because you're looking at a flat image.
After living for a few years in Montana, I moved to the Hudson Valley in New York State
and began teaching at Bard College, which I understand is ironic since as I told you
earlier, I had dropped out of high school.
Bard is a liberal arts institution, not a fine arts school.
And I knew that most of the students I was teaching wouldn't continue as photographers.
And so, I thought about "What is it that I can teach through photography that would benefit
anyone?"
And that is, again, referring to a theme that I introduced a while back, the experience
of seeing with conscious attention, and that photography is a tool from learning how to
do that, and that this is something that would benefit anyone.
That seeing with conscious attention and seeing with self-awareness, in a way, feeds people,
feeds part of the mind.