Bringing together a selection of ‘curated’ out-takes from his celebrated series Uncommon Places, the 2017 publication of Stephen Shore’s Selected Works 1973 – 1981 was another high-point in a bumper year for the artist, just in advance of a career-spanning retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, complete with its own substantial catalogue.[i] Indeed, the question this book might well provoke is whether or not it was even necessary, given the amount of exposure Shore has received to date, and the plaudits he has already garnered, in the course of a long and profoundly influential working-life. We hardly need still more proof of how a handful of largely old, largely white men – along with a very few women – dominate the institutional narratives around photography, and so, the ways in which its history is understood. In light of that, and also of the fact that Shore’s Uncommon Places has already occasioned at least two books and been included in an untold number of compilations, what might there be left to say about the work? Of course, there is no doubt now about its status; Shore’s influence can be felt everywhere in contemporary photography, if only expressed as a preference for certain subjects and photographic methodologies. In fact, the series has become a kind of ‘Rosetta Stone,’ making comprehensible so much of what followed in its wake. There is also, inevitably, if perhaps unfairly, a suspicion of barrel-scraping about such collections drawing on otherwise familiar work.
Photographers can tell all kinds of stories, and these stories emerge in many different ways; most often the preference has been to address some situation in the wider world, given the (apparent) capacity that photography has for dealing with social realities. But there is an equally important source for the stories that photographers tell, and it is to be found in their own lives, their own experience of the world. We call these stories subjective, because insofar as they are ‘about’ anything, they address a particular set of experiences seen from the perspective of the person living them: the photographer becomes their own witness. This subjective tendency is an important tradition in the medium, but hasn’t always received as much critical attention as other approaches, perhaps because of the values of specific institutions, or simply because the dominant frameworks for thinking about the medium have favoured its more ‘objective’ uses. But it is an important tradition nonetheless, and one whose influence has been far-reaching. Its origins are mostly, if not exclusively, to be found in the post-war decades, and it is this particular context that gives us a useful way of thinking about how a subjective tradition in the medium emerged.
Darren Campion 