an appropriation or an homage?

 

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And so begins something new. I'm always hesitant to broadcast much of anything about ideas for projects, being paranoid about other people taking an idea before I can do anything with it, or more likely it being a lot of hot air about something that never materializes. But it appears I'm going to make an exception this time. At least in the near future I'm going to see what I can do with some of my favorite photo books. The one I'm currently in thrall of is Stephen Shore's Uncommon Places. I might even experiment with the experiments here. See what comes of it. On the surface, the book is a collection of 8x10 photographs of Shore's cross country travels in the early 70's. I feel like some of us are still working the vein.

There's another way that an 8-x-10 photograph bears a funny relationship to time. I have a camera and a tripod. I can spend several minutes looking at the scene in front of me, I can pay attention to small details, I can see relationships in space that may not reveal themselves, and have all of this inform a picture which is then taken in very quickly by the viewer. So there is a kind of compression of time in the picture. That to be there and to see everything the camera sees could take minutes; but it can all be grasped at once on this piece of paper.

Stephen Shore Uncommon Places 2003

Comments

[Don]

Should be an interesting project

[kent]

I hope so Don. I think the reason I'm so taken with Shore at the present time is that he's so accessible. It's easy to look at his work and think there's really nothing to it. On the contrary, I think he has a great eye for details that really define the time: the early and mid 1970's in North America.