P.Art Magazine

nov / dec 2014

p.art

Get to know — Stephen Shore & Alec Soth

project description The aim for this project is to create a cohesive magazine that has clear heirarchy. This magazine includes two features on American photographers Stephen Shore and Alec Soth who are notable for the banal subject matters they capture.

American Surfaces, Amarillo, Texas August 1973

P.Art Magazine

05

American Surfaces, Toledo, Ohio, July 1972

American Surfaces, Granite, Oklahoma July, 1972

Wish You Were Here Stephen Shore is a photographer who travelled across the country capturing postcard-like scenes.

Christopher Olson and Gregory Crewdson

Shore was born on Ocotober 8 in 1947. On his sixth birthday, he received a darkroom set made by Kodak and used it to develop his family’s negatives. When he turned eight, he got a 35mm rangefinder camera and began to take his own photos. At age ten, Shore was given Walker Evans’s book, American Photographs, which influenced him greatly. At 17, Shore photographed Andy Warhol and his creative team at Warhol’s studio the Factory. In 1971, at the age of 24, he became the second living photographer with a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art.

Stephen Shore - Wish You Were Here

06

Uncommon Places, Ginger Shore, Causeway Inn, Tampa, Florida, November 17

At the age of twenty-five, Stephen Shore set off by car from his native Manhattan and headed west.

The year was 1972, and the America he discovered though his 35 mm, a vast network of windswept back roads and empty downtowns, would inspire him to crisscross the country some ten more times during the decade that followed. From this, came his series of snapshots, “American Surfaces” which are indistinguishable from your average tourist’s photos. In this series, he documents the places, hotel rooms, people and greasy spoons he encountered on his solo road trip. This was not his first time traveling across the nation. This idea of his series had been brewing for a couple of years before. Shore became friendly with a group of young people from Amarillo who all were living in New York, and every summer they would go back to Amarillo to spend the summer. He started going with them in 1969. It was an eye-opening experience for Shore for him to spend two months in the Texas Panhandle. He experienced part of the country he hadn’t experienced before, it made him want to explore the rest of it.

His camera produced work of reasonable quality within the vernacular space of the 3-by-4 drugstore print, which couldn’t handle being printed any larger. These images stand apart from the rest of his work, for they are more immediate and gestural as a form of aesthetic inquiry, using the language of a banal means of production and prefacing the pointand-shoot aesthetic seen in contemporary photographs by Tillmans, Goldin and Araki. The use of colour and the casual snapshot were seen as aesthetic no-no’s in the early ‘70s, associated more with ads and vacation slide shows than fine or conceptual art.

When asked if he was making a an sort of commen tary or a formal investigation, Shore said.

“Any artist can deal with both content and structure at the same time and have two paths of exploration, so I think they were both going on.

In formal terms I wanted to make pictures that looked—the way I put it at the time was “natural.”

By his second outing a year later, Shore had traded in the 35 millimeter for a 4 x 5 (a slower, more exacting large-format camera, later replaced by an even bulkier 8 x 10), initiating the seminal document of the American vernacular that would come to be known as “Uncommon Places”. In an interview discussing his switch to the 8x10, Shore said that he explored the question of how to put the picture together in a different way. He started making the pictures more and more structurally complex, and then making them less complex and more and more natural, more and more transparent, so that after four years he was attempting to take pictures that did in fact feel like “American Surfaces,” but having gone through this whole process, following a spiral and coming back to the same point, different level.

Uncommon Places, Presidio, Texas, February 21, 1975

Uncommon Places, Second Street East and South Main Street, Kalispell, Montana, August 22, 1974

P.Art Magazine

7, 1977

Uncommon Places, Sugar Bowl Restaurant, July 7, 1973

Stephen Shore - Wish You Were Here

08 Uncommon Places, Stampeder Motel, Ontario, Oregon, July 19, 1973

P.Art Magazine

Stephen Shore - Wish You Were Here

Uncommon Places, West Third Street, Parkersburg, West Virginia, May 16, 1974

In these landmark images, the amount of content within the picture frame acts as an extension of Euclid’s maxim that “nothing that is seen is seen at once in its entirety.” This density becomes a distillation of the act of seeing, and not merely looking, the punch provided by a surreal hyper-awareness within the frame. Shore’s large C-prints do not represent a captured moment, but an actual record of the 20-odd minutes it would take to set up the shot; everything refracted through the lens is funnelled into the click of the shutter and rendered in such detail that the prints invite the type of close study reserved for a Van Eyck painting.

In “Uncommon Places”, we see the difference in between taking pictures, and making pictures where the images of houses and parking lots never appear to be more than what they actually are, due to the clarity of their surroundings. But his images of Terrace Bay, Ontario, or Great Barrington, MA, stand with a quiet dignity, no matter how dilapidated or mundane the little houses or intersections may appear. In a photograph such as 5th Street & Broadway, Eureka, CA, September 24, 1974, Shore places us above an empty intersection, near a parking lot festive with automobiles, where a racial slur in faded circus colors doubles as a corporate logo. A pocket of urban sprawl depicted with the epic clarity and sense of scale once reserved before natural wonders, Shore’s image introduces color (then associated only with the snapshot and the ad), amplifying the location’s lurid markers to the consumption. Shore’s work, traditionally assessed

P.Art Magazine

within a framework of aesthetic formalism, has been mistaken-like the photography of Walker Evans before it-for simply an exploration of the beauty in the banal. Shore may have intended to graft the trademark Warholian aloofness onto the places he passed through, but wound up making not only an unwitting homage to the unsung, but a body of work that was uniquely part of his own artistic trajectory, combining and then breaking away from the Pop art and conceptual vogues of the time.nted as “quaint” or “other” for urban “sophistoes,” he creates a quiet tribute to these common, yet quite uncommon, spaces that make up the fabric of North America.

Because the content is not suffocated by theoretical considerations, there is a remarkable warmth in the work, despite an initial austerity These spaces are not at such a remove that you find yourself unable to relate to the works. He is documenting the mythological America and occasionally Canada (look for the grain elevators in the background), through the equally mythopoetic rite of the road trip, in deadpan images of what we usually ignore: the parking lots, motels and nondescript Main Streets of Anywheresville, the liminal spaces between the major urban centres and the tourist traps. By taking on the simultaneous roles of Tourist behind the wheel and Artist riding shotgun, we also see a document of spaces that have more than likely disappeared by now, a photographic Easy Rider showing a pastoral North America on the crest and spray of Modernism, the architecture and aesthetics giving way to its eventual Wal-mart-ization.It’s an evocative and nostalgic world that is on view, some 20 to 30 years later, if

Uncommon Places, El Paso Str

11

only for the makes and models of cars pictured (his Valiant seems to keep popping up in a lot of them).

As clinical as the work may appear, Shore retains his thesis that his photography is always biographical so the earliest to most recent work may not just be a record of the artist’s own movements through the landscape, but the viewer’s as well.

“Before ‘American Surfaces’ I was doing these snapshots with the Mick-A-Matic, and all snapshots were in color. It’s really as simple as that. You couldn’t get a black-and-white snapshot then. You couldn’t take film to your corner drugstore and get black-andwhite processing. Also, all postcards at the time were in color. When I was traveling with Amarillo as my base I would collect postcards, which would be of

a motel or a diner or a main street—something an art photographer might not have thought of photographing. They were often made without any kind of artistic pretension, and they were in color and the color added a layer of information. Why is this room painted this color? What does that mean? It’s as resonant with meaning as the form of things and so fascinating to me.”

“The only time I ever heard Evans speak was at

reet, El Paso, Texas, July 5, 1975

the Modern [Museum of Modern Art], at the time of his big retrospective in the early Seventies. He talked about his photographs being transcendent documents. I took that to mean that he understood that the pictures existed on a level that had deep psychological resonances that were not simply a matter of cultural reference, as well as a level of cultural reference. I didn’t think about beauty a lot.

During “American Surfaces” I was photographing every meal I ate and what art on walls looked like.

I saw myself as an explorer. I was thinking about the structural problems in the photograph, [about] photography as a technical means of communicating what the world looks like if you see it in a state of heightened awareness. The subject matter that interested me for various other reasons was the perfect subject matter for this exploration, because if the subject matter is too highly charged, a viewer can become involved in those aspects of the picture and be less open to the subtler aspects of it.”

Stephen Shore - Wish You Were Here

14 Swimming by the Mississippi, Charles, Vasa, Minnesota, 2002

P.Art Magazine

Sleeping by the Mississippi, Luxora, Arkansas, 2002.

Sleeping by the Mississippi, Helena, Arkansas, 2002

Tall People, Targets and Tents Alec Soth is a notable photographer most associated with his “large-scale projects” featuring the midwest.

Aaron Schuman

His photography has a cinematic feel with elements of folklore that hint at a story behind the image. New York Times art critic Hilarie M. Sheets wrote that he has made a “photographic career out of finding chemistry with strangers” and photographs “loners and dreamers”. His work tends to focus on the “off-beat, hauntingly banal images of modern America” according to The Guardian art critic Hannah Booth. His work has been compared to photographers such as Walker Evans and Stephen Shore. Soth is a member of Magnum photo agency.

Alec Soth - Tall People, Targets, Tents

16

Sleeping By The Mississippi, N

Soth liked the work of Diane Arbus. Diane Arbus was an American photographer and writer noted for black-and-white square photographs of “deviant and marginal people (dwarfs, giants, transgender, nudists, circus performers) or of people whose normality seems ugly or surreal”. Arbus believed a camera could be “a little bit cold, a little bit harsh”, but that its scrutiny revealed the truth—the difference between what people wanted others to see, and what they really did see: the flaws. A friend said that Arbus said she was “afraid...that she would be known simply as ‘the photographer of freaks.”

He traveled around the Mississippi River and made a self-printed book entitled Sleeping by the Mississippi which included both landscapes and portraits.

Curators for the 2004 Whitney Biennial put him in their show, and one of his photographs entitled “Charles”, of a man in a flight suit on his roof holding two model airplanes, was used in their poster.

When he photographs people, Soth feels nervous at times. He said: “My own awkwardness comforts people, I think. It’s part of the exchange.” When he was on the road, he’d have notes describing types of pictures he wanted taped to the steering wheel of his car. One list was: “beards, birdwatchers, mushroom hunters, men’s retreats, after the rain, figures from behind, suitcases, tall people (especially skinny), targets, tents, treehouses and tree lines.[2] With people, he’ll ask their permission to photograph them, and often wait for them to get comfortable; he sometimes uses an 8x10 camera. He tries to find a “narrative arc and true storytelling” and pictures in which each picture will lead to the next one.

“I fell in love with the process of taking pictures, with wandering around finding things. To me it feels like a kind of performance.”

Broken Manual, (I Love My Dad), 2007

Sleeping by the Mississippi, Green Island Iowa, 2002

P.Art Magazine

New Orleans, 2002

Soth received fellowships from the McKnight and Jerome Foundations and was the recipient of the 2003 Santa Fe Prize for Photography. His photographs are in major public and private collections, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and the Walker Art Center. His work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including the 2004 Whitney Biennial.

His first book, Sleeping by the Mississippi, was published in 2004. “Sleeping by the Mississippi” captures America’s iconic yet oft-neglected “third coast”. Soth’s richly descriptive, large-format color photographs present an eclectic mix of individuals, landscapes, and interiors. Sensuous in detail and raw in subject, “Sleeping by the Mississippi” elicits a consistent mood of loneliness, longing, and reverie. “In the book’s 46 ruthlessly edited pictures,” writes Anne Wilkes Tucker, “Soth alludes to illness, procreation, race, crime, learning, art, music, death, religion, redemption, politics, and cheap sex.” Like Robert Frank’s classic “The Americans”, “Sleeping

Sleeping by the Mississippi, the Farm, Angola State Prison, Louisiana, 2002

by the Mississippi” merges a documentary style with poetic sensibility. The Mississippi is less the subject of the book than its organizing structure. Not bound by a rigid concept or ideology, the series is created out of a quintessentially American spirit of wanderlust. His second book, Niagara, was published in 2006. One of his photos is of a woman in a bridal gown sitting outside what appears to be a motel; he describes having made an arrangement with a particular wedding chapel in Niagara Falls which let him take pictures of couples getting married, by photographing them after their weddings.

Soth made several more photographic books including Last Days of W, a book about a country “drained

by George W. Bush’s presidency”. Soth has photographed for The New York Times Magazine, Fortune and Newsweek. Soth, along with writer Lester B. Morrison, created Broken Manual over four years (2006-2010) an underground instruction manual for those looking to escape their lives. Soth investigates the places in which people retreat to escape civilization, he photographs monks, survivalists, hermits

Alec Soth - Tall People, Targets, Tents

18

Sleeping by the Mississippi, Peter’s Houseboat, Winona, Minnesota, 2002

The Last Days of W, Ron, San Antonio, Texas, 2005

P.Art Magazine

Alec Soth - Tall People, Targets, Tents

20

Grand Twin Cinema, Paris, Texas, 2006

Home, Treasure Island Casino, Minnesota, 2002

and runaways. Soth concurrently produced the photo book From Here to There: Alec Soth’s America an overview of Soth’s photography from the early 1990s to the present twenty first century.

Soth founded the publishing house, Little Brown Mushroom (LBM), in 2010. Through it, he publishes his own, and that of other like-minded people, “narrative photography books that function in a similar way to children’s books,” in book, magazine and newspaper formats. He has collaborated on numerous books with Brad Zellar, a Minnesota writer.

In 2010, Soth flew to the United Kingdom but was denied a work visa, but was allowed into the country with the understanding that if he was “caught taking photographs” he could be put in prison for up to two years. So he handed the camera to his young daughter who took pictures in Brighton.

In 2004, Soth became a nominee of the Magnum Photos agency and in 2008 he became a full member.

He has expressed an interest in photographing “hermits, Scarlett Johansson, happy people, unusually tall people, Welsh countryside.” Soth is represented

by Weinstein Gallery and Sean Kelly Gallery.

Soth’s large-scale colour photographs combine satire, pathos, nostalgia and humour in their exploration of Americana. The subjects of his works are frequently marginal figures or landscapes, invested with their own quiet beauty or interest, and often encountered by chance on long road trips undertaken by the artist. Soth’s work has iconography of the familiar and the alien, juxtaposing a clear-eyed documentary style with glints of the uncanny.

P.Art Magazine

Travelling from his native Midwest, to Niagara Falls, and the streets of Colombia, Soth emerged as one of the most consistently arresting American artists at work today. Many of his subjects are redolent of a more profound sense of social crisis or urban decay.

The slow process of Soth’s practice, involving an old-fashioned 8x10 inch camera on a tripod, helps imbue the works with their characteristic stillness.

The artist’s reluctance to pose his subjects means the distance between the photographer and the photographed is always maintained. It is this distance (what he calls ‘space between us’) that interests Soth, in that it suggests the limitations of a viewer’s identification with his subject. As such, his photographs possess the simple honesty of a fact or scene presented, a moment in time revealed to the viewer.

In the past ten years, Soth’s solo projects and the commissioned work he undertakes have seen him travel extensively around the United States, picturing many different people and milieus: mothers of Marines serving in Iraq, religion in the American workplace, the biggest landfill, and the mortgage crisis in Stockton, California. Rather than the myth of the American Dream, many of these images instead evoke the decline of the American Empire.

Drawn from the eight years of George Bush’s presidency (2000-08), Soth’s most recent body of work suggests a longer-term look at the same phenomenon. ‘The Last Days of W’ represents, according to the artist, ‘a panoramic look at a country exhausted by its catastrophic leadership’. This collection of photographs - some old, some new - presents a singular narrative, addressing among other things the disjunction between the public face and private lives of America, and the beauty of things forgotten.

“In assembling this collection of pictures I’ve made over the last eight years I guess I’m not really trying to accomplish much at all. But, as President Bush once said ‘One of the great things about books is, sometimes there are some fantastic pictures’”.

Alec Soth - Tall People, Targets, Tents