The Stephen Shore retrospective opening Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art could not have come at a better time. In an age when iPhones have turned most everyone into a wandering photographer of medium-to-low talent, Shore offers a model of straight photography at its most lucid and ravishing. Well-known in photography circles, he earned his first fame with scenes of small-town America, bright, crystalline landscapes with blue skies, big, ‘70s-era cars and poetically empty space.
A native New Yorker who is now 70, Shore was visibly influenced by the American tradition of street photography. It flourished in the 1950s, and was based on the idea that travel and adventure and chance encounters with piquant strangers were likely to improve your photographs. The style went out of favor in the 1970s, when Cindy Sherman and the so-called “Pictures Generation” spawned a vogue for studio-based photography — pictures that might be posed or staged or altered on a computer, and which made explorations of the city or hinterlands seem voyeuristic and passé.
Shore, by contrast, continues to travel widely for his work, and he follows a host of self-imposed rules that disallow for any kind of manipulation or post-production alteration. He claims he never crops his pictures. And he does not stage them. He makes them without using props or models or flash bulbs. Rather, his usual practice is to work with available light, preferably of the brightest kind. He heads to random-seeming locations — from Granite, OK, to Columbia, SC, to Bucha, Ukraine — to practice his own form of extreme looking. When he decides to snap a picture, he gives himself only one chance to get it right, and then moves on.
His failure to work in a single style, and the difficulty of summarizing his various experiments over the years, has probably hindered his reputation. He is not a household name, and one hopes that the MoMA show will broaden his following. His best photographs, I think, have less in common with street photography than with Edward Hopper’s paintings, featuring rooms and landscapes that are devoid of people but seem breathtakingly alive in their stillness.
Consider, for instance, “Breakfast, Trail’s End Restaurant, Kanab, Utah, August 10, 1973,” which is set in a diner, and endows a plate of pancakes with the sumptuousness of a Dutch still-life painting. It’s all so appealing — the table has a pre-touched pristineness, with its white napkin still folded in place, and a glass of milk filled to the brim. Diner tabletops and their homey offerings are one of the few subjects that recur in Shore’s work over the decades, a reminder that we are all seeking to be fed, and photography of this quality can be pretty filling.
