Top Stephen Shore Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Stephen Shore Biography

Stephen Shore (born October 8, 1947) is an American photographer known for his images of banal scenes and objects in the United States, and for his pioneering use of color in art photography. His books include Uncommon Places (1982) and American Surfaces (1999), photographs that he took on cross-country road trips in the 1970s.

Read about Stephen Shore in Wikipedia

Random Authors

Stephen Shore Quotes

Photographers have to impose order, bring structure to what they photograph. It is inevitable. A photograph without structure is like a sentence without grammar-it is incomprehensible, even inconceivable.

Bring, Order, Photographer, Photographers, Photography, Sentence

I do what feels natural, but I can't say I haven't thought about it.

Feels, Natural, Photographer, Thought

A work can do many things at once, and it doesn't have to be just about the world, it could also be about photography, it could be about perception, it could be an exploration of the medium. It could be a document, it could be a visual poetry, and it could be a formal exploration all at the same time.

Document, Perception, Photography, Same, Time, World

If I only try to solve the problems I set for myself, then I'm limited by what I can conceive of. I can't solve a problem I can't conceive. But if someone else gives me a visual problem, it can be out of the whole realm of my normal practice.

Conceive, Giving, Problem, Realm, Trying, Visual

The danger is that you can wind up doing tourist pictures. I want to see it fresh and see the little bits of everyday life that a native might take for granted, but that are special to the place, while at the same time, not taking a picture that would be a tourist cliché.

Bits, Everyday, Fresh, Special, Time, Wind

I think most serious photographers understand that there's this large gap between the world and how the world looks through a photograph.

Large, Looks, Photograph, Thinking, Understand, World

I don't know how much a photograph can add to a biography, the way a film or writing or narrative medium could. Because it's a frozen image.

Film, Frozen, Know, Photograph, Writing

I'm always interested in finding new aesthetic problems to deal with and challenge myself, even if the aesthetic problem is one of content.

Aesthetic, Challenge, Challenges, Interested, Problem

A quote that I like very much comes close to explaining my attitude about taking photographs. ‘Chinese poetry rarely trespasses beyond the bounds of actuality the great Chinese poets accept the world exactly as they find it in all its terms and with profound simplicity they seldom talk about one thing in terms of another; but are able enough and sure enough as artists to make the ultimately exact terms become the beautiful terms. ’

Accept, Artist, Attitude, Beautiful, Close, World

This idea of imposing an order is very interesting to me. Photography is in essence an analytic medium. … In photography, you start with the whole world and every decision you make imposes an order on it. The question is to what extent it’s an idealized order I’m imposing or is it an order that grows out of what the world looks like.

Decisions You Make, Idea, Imposing, Order, Photography, Whole

If you've met one person with autism, you've met one person with autism.

Autism, Met, Mets, Person, Persons

I think I misunderstood Instagram and just thought it was people photographing their friends, and discovered there were a number of people, a number of artists, who were taking it very seriously and doing very imaginative work with Instagram as the medium.

Artist, Numbers, People, Seriously, Thinking, Work

I have to be reminded, “’It’s your son’s birthday party. Bring a camera. ’ And then, when I’m there, ‘Take a picture,’ because it doesn’t occur to me to use it as this memorializing thing.

Camera, Cameras, Party, Son, Take, Use

I meet young artists and it becomes clear that with some the main motivation is getting a show in Chelsea. It strikes me that this is very different to the way it was for me, which was that I wanted to understand photography and the world and myself.

Artist, Artists, Motivation, Photography, Understand, Young

As not a native, I have the advantage of not seeing scenes habitually. I can see things fresh.

Advantage, Native, Scene, Scenes, Things

There's something arbitrary about taking a picture. So I can stand at the edge of a highway and take one step forward and it can be a natural landscape untouched by man and I can take one step back and include a guardrail and change the meaning of the picture radically. . . I can take a picture of a person at one moment and make them look contemplative and photograph them two seconds later and make them look frivolous.

Art, Back, Creativity, Photography, Stand, Taking

Even in ordinary reproduction [photography] verges on facsimile.

Facsimile, Ordinary, Photography, Verge, Verges

A lot of the photography I'm doing and thinking about is directed at Instagram.

Instagram, Photography, Thinking

Why can't a photograph be all four things at once? -be an art object; be a document, what ever that means exactly, but deal with content; be a formalist exploration; and operate on some, metaphor is not the right word but, resonant level.

Art, Content, Exploration, Levels, Mean, Metaphor

With a painting, you're taking basic building blocks and making something that's more complex than what you started with. It is a synthetic process. A photograph does the opposite: It takes the world, and puts an order on it, simplifies it.

Block, Order, Photograph, Photography, Synthetic, World

1