Photographers: June 2006 Archives

For the past year or so, there seems to be a burst of interest in Stephen Shore. From a profile on Shore in the Guardian last Fall:

I do think about why people are all of a sudden looking at my work and it occurs to me that it may have needed a distance in time for people to see what I was actually looking at. People need time. It's much easier to look at the past than to look at the present. I was looking at the present and people didn't want to see it until it became - for them - the past.

303 Gallery's Shore show closes in less than 2 weeks, so in case you've missed any of the others, this one would serve as an introduction. What differentiates this show from others I've seen is the inclusion of reproductions of Shore's travel journals from 1973. Each page or two outlines the day, recording the odometer reading, the evening's lodging and TV viewing, the day's meals (where, not what), exposures made and their location, all accompanied by receipts for gas and local postcards from each stop. Interestingly, manyu of these postcards feature unironic landscapes of downtown business districts, mirrored in Shore's own work. As for the record of shots, Shore was using an 8X10 view camera, so the shot count is low. No one day reaches into double digits.

3-Jul-73 by Stephen Shore

Through July 7th at 303 Gallery
525 W 22nd St
(212) 255-1121

Idris Khan's "Every Nicholas Nixon's The Brown Sisters" was featured in the recent "reGeneration" show that just closed at Aperture, an appropriated photograph made up of the average of all Nixon's group portraits of his wife and her sisters. Kahn's amalgamated take on the Becher's typologies has been picked up byt eh blogospher, it seems.

Joerg caught on to Khan last Fall.

Is it just me, or does this just seem like a parlor trick?