与斯蒂芬·肖尔对谈：作为意义体验的摄影

So first, it needs to be understood that Shakespeare is speaking poetically in the same play, Hamlet. He uses the phrase “the teeth and forehead of our faults.” What does that mean？“The teeth and forehead of our faults.” He's speaking in poetry. And that's the same with form and pressure. I think that the closest word that might help understand it is, in fact, the word 'impression.' Because 'impression' has several meanings. If I place my thumb on a block of soft clay, it will leave an impression. At the same time, if someone says something to me that's startling, I will have an impression, so both the physical and psychological aspects of the term 'pressure', I think, be captured fairly closely in the word 'impression.'

I would also like to comment on what you said at the beginning about structure being a refined composition. What I'm saying is composition, is completely unrelated to photography in my essay 'Form and Pressure.'

When I say photography, I mean 'straight photography.'  Photography is different from painting in that the painter starts with a blank canvas. And every mark they make on the canvas adds complexity to it. They are putting it together. A photographer does, in a sense, the opposite; the photographer starts with the whole world. And every decision they make, rather than adding complexity, distils their experience. A process where things are putting together, like painting or music composition, is referred to as synthetic. The work is synthesized. The process of photography, which is taking a whole and distilling it, is a process that's analytic. The English word 'synthetic' comes from a Greek root: “συντιθέναι” (syntithénai), which means literally to put together. The English word composition comes from a Latin root: “componere”, which also means to put together. Composition refers to a synthetic process, not an analytic process. It doesn't describe what a photographer does. It would be more accurate to say that a photographer solves a picture. I see structure as the visual grammar of photography. Grammar is the structure of language. The results of choices in photography, of where to stand, where to place the frame, where to focus the camera, and when to release the shutter, those decisions are the root basics of a photographic solution. Just as it's inconceivable to have a sentence that has no grammar, it's equally inconceivable to have a photograph that has no structure. I'll leave it there for now.

I'll answer the question. My use of the word ‘structure’ is not based on any knowledge of Levi-Strauss. I was just trying to find a word the closest word, to describe what it actually feels like, to make a picture, to make the decisions behind making a picture.

More than pressure, I would use the word form. I would emphasize 'form' and 'structure' in the picture on the left. I tried to hold as many visual elements in my mind as possible and organized space pictures. And when I made this picture, I realized that in my effort to pay attention to everything in the picture and to organize the space, I used essentially an organization that might be found in 17th-century Western landscape painting. And I wanted to find out if I could create a picture where the form of picture or the structure itself of the picture reflected more the structure of the contemporary experience. So I went back to the same intersection the next day and made the picture on the right, in which the camera is as carefully placed as the picture on the left, but rather than imposing a structure on the scene to the best of my ability, knowing that I'm always projecting something, but still to the best of my ability, I let the structure of the picture, my decisions, grow out of the scene itself as opposed to, as I said, imposing a structure on it.

Something occurred to me just now. Jang Rong and I have been having a discussion about how to define what pictorialism is in photography. One aspect of what he and I both feel about pictorialism is, perhaps, let me ask you this Rong, that those photographers are trying to quote and compose a picture, and that's why it looks, in a way, divergent from the central experience of photography. So I'm asking you, could this be one of the ways of describing pictorialism that the photographer is trying to compose a picture? That there is a sense of forcing the world into a composition rather than structure in a picture.

When a photographer has spent some time exploring the materials of photography, the technique of photography, so that technique becomes second nature, and that might take years and then explores the formal qualities of photography, the grammar of the image as I put it before, And that may take years. Then the photographer may find that qualities of perception, the subtleties of their attention become embedded in the photograph itself. If such a photographer who's had those years of experience, is in a state of heightened awareness, is, as an athlete might say, 'in the zone' if that photographer is acting in the center of the present, that experience will be embedded in the photograph.

So I would say two things. The first is, that it would be hard for me to imagine that the cultural background does not affect perception that all of the conversations I had, works of art I looked at， music I listened to. All the experiences of my life, my relationships with my wife and son. I imagine all of these have an impact on the experience. But there's a second part, which is that in the midst of work, I'm not thinking about any of that. It's almost like I'm not thinking. The pictures just happened. During the decade that I worked on Uncommon Places, This was the time I was learning, in a new, clearer way, the formal attributes of photography. During that time I would have formal questions in my mind. They would 'arise'. And I use the word arise because it wasn't like I was sitting around thinking about them. As I answered, visually answered one question, a new question would just come into my mind. So I was thinking in those terms in a very concrete way, like what happens when I have the curb of the road go exactly into the corner of the picture as opposed to just above the corner of the picture. How does that change perception? At the same time, even though I was thinking about those, all the other aspects that make the photograph, that was what I described before as simply happening. And then, after that decade, when I was learning the formal aspects of photography, from that point on, there weren't many specific questions in my mind. I would just let the process take over.

So, I think that the experience of focusing your eyes through the picture is not simply a function of the car in the background in the center, being further away from me than the car in the foreground. I think there are formal qualities that lead to the sense of refocusing. And I think there are psychological qualities that lead to that sense of focus. So let me mention a formal quality decision I made. That the first pole, the one closest to the camera is cut off by the frame on the bottom. That places it exactly on the picture plane. It reads as though it is sitting right on the surface of the picture, which establishes the picture plane so that the rest of the image falls behind it. And let me add one other thing. I talked about the visual logic in this picture. If I lowered the camera so that the top of the car cut off the bottom of the telephone pole right behind it, that would destroy the visual logic by giving that little bit of space. I allow the viewer the clarity to read the space in the picture.

But there's also a psychological aspect, which is when I'm looking at this, my mental image has great depth and let me explain what I mean by mental image. Our eyes work exactly like a digital camera. The lens focuses light on the retina, which is, in fact, a digital array. The retina sends an electrochemical signal along the optic nerve to the brain. And in the brain, like a computer opening a JPEG, our mind opens the digital signal. They create images. This is how we see everything because the image is mental. It is a mental formation. It is influenced by our thoughts and our feelings. For example, If we feel very strong emotions, the mental image will become flatter. If we tell ourselves to be deeply aware of the depth of space in front of us, our mental image becomes deeper. It becomes more three-dimensional. We see a mental image all the time when our eyes are open, and when we're sleeping, we see it when we dream. One doesn't need to be aware that they are seeing a mental image to, in fact, have a mental image. But what I'm suggesting is that if you are able to stand back in a meta-cognitive way and observe your mental image, then as a photographer, you have the ability, you can learn the ability to refine it.

So the process I'm talking about involves learning to see with attention. Photography, for me, was the tool that focused me. It was the tool for me to learn this. But the end goal is not to take alive and attentive photographs. The end goal is to live a vivid life. Photography was the training method. It was by learning photography. It was the discipline to help me learn to live with attention, but the goal is to live with attention, not to make good photographs.

Yes, Rong, do you think it would be possible for me to hold my phone up to the camera here so that people could see the photograph of my family?

Okay. I'm saying I want to keep it in the middle of the screen. RONG, do you know what I'm going to say?

You need to use the word collage. It is the sense of “collage” that's important.

So let me explain what you are seeing the difference between a part of a picture that the photographer is paying clear and focused attention to and the part of a picture where the photographer is not paying attention. This discrepancy, this valley between the two, becomes greater as the photographer develops stronger and more focused abilities of attention.

I would simply share that my experience here and the attention and reception to my work here have been very meaningful to me. I'm grateful.

I find them both interesting. The first seems iconic. It is as structurally dense as any picture I’ve made. The second is a more difficult image. It’s not as classically grand. It looks like I’m almost not doing anything. That’s why I like it. It has a less pictorial feel. It’s more like being there.

I don’t think of it that way.

I know nothing or very little about the creators of much of the music, literature, and art that means the most to me.

The clearest answer I could possibly give you, I wrote in my essay. “Form and Pressure”.

The answer to this question is the pictures in the book.

Hilla Becher and I became friends in 1973. In 1977, Bernd Becher organized an exhibition of my photographs at the Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf. Bernd told his students, “This is what your work should look like”. In 1995, I visited the Becher class at the art academy in Düsseldorf. I spent the evening discussing my work and critiquing the students’ work. The students had prepared a dinner for us. The session went far into the night. For years, Bernd and Hilla had some photographs of mine hanging in their house. I still have one of theirs hanging in mine.

Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Isenour and I were friends. In the mid-1970’s, I did all of the photography for their firm. Our largest collaboration was an exhibition, “Signs of Life: Symbols in the American City”. 1976, Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

Venturi wrote the following for the first, 1982, edition of Uncommon Places:

“STEPHEN SHORE captures the essence of the American landscape by framing particular, ordinary elements so that they reveal the universal and the extraordinary. The viewpoint of his camera is never special; it is that of our own absent-minded eyes as we wander through familiar places doing ordinary things – waiting for a bus or driving on an errand. In Shore's photographs we discover the mislaid images that we ignored because of their very familiarity or rejected because of their banality. Our conscious minds seek more interesting or less objectionable scenes – Alpine peaks or Italian piazzas; in Shore's art we confront what we usually do not notice, streets and façades at once well known and remote, half-remembered and half-forgotten.

Shore's is the art of deadpan – rejecting exotic compositions, artful editing, or facile simplification. He accepts the threadbare banality of the American scene, the jerry-rigged, down-at-the-heels seediness of our rural landscapes and the spatial looseness of our towns, recapturing the overfamiliar, making it poignant, coherent, and almost lovable.”

The “continuity of space” is not a matter of perspective. It has to do with the visual relationships between shapes, lines, forms, surfaces. It’s about the connections and interstices between them when 3-dimensional space is flattened onto the picture plane. It can exist in pictures that do not have one-point perspective.

Neither a limitation nor a new opportunity.

When I began working in photography there were hardly any colleges or universities in which photography was offered as a course of study. Institute for Design in Chicago, Brooklyn College, San Francisco Art Institute, The Rhode Island School of Design. Perhaps a few others. Most photographers of my generation learned by looking at books and by meeting with like-minded friends to discuss each other’s work. Now most photographers learn in colleges and graduate programs. There they have to critique each other’s pictures, describe their intentions, and defend their work, So they hone these skills as well as their ability to make photographs.

I think so. I once had a very talented student who took a US military VR program for training soldiers to fight in villages and the countryside in a desert environment. He took 3-dimensional “snaphots” within this VR environment. He then created a VR exhibition hall. The viewer could put on a VR headset, walk through the “gallery”, and view the individual pictures on the wall. In making the “snapshots”, he made the same kinds of decisions a photographer would make in the real world: where to stand, where to place the frame.

1. I began in the world of traditional photography. My time at Warhol’s Factory exposed me to the broader contemporary art world. Even my conceptually based work had a strong visual component. I understood the visual meaning was being conveyed beyond the concept. About 25 years ago John Baldessari and I gave a public talk about our work of that period. We found we had similar intentions: to use the determining concept to help lessen the stamp of personal style from the work. To seek an image less mediated by visual convention. Finally, I wasn’t totally satisfied with this approach. I wanted to find a new path of photographic seeing. I wanted to make pictures that didn’t look like someone was making pictures but looked like seeing itself. This was the beginning of American Surfaces. From that point on, my work evolved in response to questions of content and form that “arose” in me, more than they were guided by me.

2. A book is strictly a linear sequence. Because a gallery presents a 3-dimensional space, photographs on one wall can resonate off of pictures across the room. At my retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, the gallery showing my 1980’s landscapes had panels suspended from the ceiling, with a picture of each side. Books and shows need to be treated uniquely. For example, American Surfaces is always exhibited as a grid, three rows high. The order of the pictures is random. For the book, the pictures a run in chronological order and printed 2, 3, or 4 to a spread.