| Among the best of the works in Stephen Shore’s show at the International Center of Photography is a photo of a McDonald’s hamburger, Perrine, Florida, November 11, 1977. It’s a portal through time that asserts, in one swift psychic jolt, how culture changes and how specific the look of any particular moment is. Look closely and you’ll see that the meat inside the hamburger is red—an unnerving detail that reveals legions of information about our country and culture, then and now. All photos say, “This will only ever occur this way once”; Shore’s prove it and tell you something about why and how this matters. |  |
Stephen Shore at the ICP – Elwyn Palmerton
Among the best of the works in Stephen Shore’s show at the International Center of Photography is a photo of a McDonald’s hamburger, Perrine, Florida, November 11, 1977. It’s a portal through time that asserts, in one swift psychic jolt, how culture changes and how specific the look of any particular moment is. Look closely and you’ll see that the meat inside the hamburger is red—an unnerving detail that reveals legions of information about our country and culture, then and now. All photos say, “This will only ever occur this way once”; Shore’s prove it and tell you something about why and how this matters. The “now” that we exist in politically, culturally, historically and personally is the same “now” that has metaphysical implications. The shutter opens and closes as time curves away into oblivion, leaving only the photo.
A veritable prodigy, Shore started taking and developing his own photos at the age of nine, was influenced by a book of Walker Evans’ photographs at the age of ten and met Andy Warhol, became part of the Factory scene and photographed it at the age of 17. In 1971, at 24, he became the first living photographer to have a solo show at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art. Not bad, considering that it wasn’t until 1972 that he began his most memorable and defining work when he embarked upon his first of many cross-country road-trips.
In his own words, Shore says that he grew up, “mostly in a few square miles in Manhattan.” His eye for America is quintessentially a New Yorker’s eye for America: a combination of fascination, love, awe and perplexity at all of its open spaces, highways, road-side pit stops and suburbs mixed with a sense of detachment and distance from these foreign, familiar, provincial-seeming places and their automobile-centric way of life (an eye like mine that finds Wal-Mart, for example, to be, well, exotic). His photos reveal all the weird mental dislocations that occur while we travel: the antiseptic ambiance of hotel rooms, different-looking food in new places, the smell of the air when you step out of the car and the sense of a million possible worlds and lives sliding by your passenger side window.
Having assimilated Warhol’s cool irony, eye for the banal and use of serialism and the grid, Shore understood the Pop worldview, in particular, that culture had eclipsed nature in our world. We experience the natural by driving to it, putting our kid in a mass-produced stroller and pitching an orange nylon tent in the governmentally protected woods, seen here in a series of photographs of Yellowstone National Park.
An obvious precursor to Andreas Gursky, Shore photographs these things like he just flew in from Mars. A 1978 photo of the New York Yankees stretching and warming up during spring training in Florida (Yankees, West Palm Beach, Florida, March 14, 1978), for example, reads equally well as an faux-anthropological document, say, “Uniformed alpha-males on Earth in the Year 1979 A.D. engaged in semi-ritualistic preparations for organized athletic activity,” or something like that. Gursky, anyway, only had to take Shore’s formal pizzazz, Pop punch and cool distance and blow them up to match the proportions and scale of 90s commerce and globalization to arrive at his ginormo panoramas and God’s eye views.
Shore’s America in the 70s (all of the photos here are from that decade) is still our America—in part. You can see instantly the disjunction and similarities that separate our time from theirs. Cars are still ubiquitous, though the styles and colors are different. Technology and plastics have made everything look snazzier or more digital. Gas costs a lot more, but its price is no less of a national source of concern than it was then. (It’s his inclusion of these simple facts, like gas prices visible on the pump or the aforementioned undercooked beef, that strikes me as both prescient and a surprisingly simple key to his work’s psychic wallop.)
And the highway is still a symbol of America (Go West! The open road), even if global warming is making us more self-conscious about it. Shore captured it best in U.S. 97, South of Klamath Fall, Oregon, July 21, 1973, taken about seven years before Richard Prince started re-photographing Marlboro ads with their text cropped out. Along the roadside we see a billboard with a scenic picture of verdant fields and snowcapped mountains echoed by the vista directly behind it—a sort of found photographic trompe l’oeil. More than a sight gag or visual tautology, the photograph gradually reveals something else. The billboard is the Romantic image of the American landscape—ironically free of roads, power-lines, fences, cars and, most suspiciously, billboards and ads, as the name of whatever product it might have advertised has been painted out. The landscape around it is the real one, replete with all of these things and more. Together, they’re a singular picture of how the world can change faster than our ability to see it clearly, how the images we make of it can sometimes be pleasing but also deceptive and how we must in perpetuity learn to see it anew, differently and as it is.
