{"id":6956,"date":"2022-10-25T20:15:06","date_gmt":"2022-10-25T20:15:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/liberatinglens\/?page_id=6956"},"modified":"2022-12-12T15:54:31","modified_gmt":"2022-12-12T15:54:31","slug":"franovic-selina","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/courses.lsa.umich.edu\/liberatinglens\/franovic-selina\/","title":{"rendered":"Franovic, Selina"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Thesis & Background<\/h2>\n
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American Surfaces: From road trip minutiae to meaningful art<\/em><\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n
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Albuquerque, New Mexico, June 1972. Stephen Shore<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

Stephen Shore was born in 1947 to successful, business-owning Jewish parents. He grew up a privileged only child in the Upper East Side of New York and got introduced to photography at a young age. At the age of 6, his uncle gifted him dark room equipment which he used to develop family photographs until he began taking his own photos at 9 when his parents bought him a 35 mm camera. Already by the age of 14, he began getting recognized for his work on a small scale. After meeting with Edward Steichen, the Director of the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, he sold his first three photographs as Steichen was impressed by his work [1]<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

His best-known work is his photobook called American Surfaces<\/em> which is a collection of hundreds of photographs he took while on a road trip across America in 1972 and 1973. Despite his early beginnings in photo development, Shore talks about how his photos at New York\u2019s Light Gallery were not printed by himself or even in a professional lab. Rather, he sent his film to Kodak and took the prints Kodak gave him, not agonizing over color correction, and arranged them in a 3×3 grid on the wall, breaking every rule about presentation of art photography at the time. He said in the same interview with Phaidon that his composition was \u201clike seeing\u201d with the subject often placed in the middle of the photo [2]<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This different approach, compared to the work of photographers like Strand, Kertesz, Winogrand, and Friedlander displayed in the same gallery, received varying criticism. Shore published to his website a \u201cvitriolic\u201d review by the Village Voice in 1971 that says that Shore\u2019s concepts were \u201cso lightweight that only their translation into objects to which we attach aesthetic significance could give them enough heft so that they might be taken seriously,\u201d while other critics suggested that his work was \u201cunnecessary\u201d and \u201cdispensable\u201d because they were just a means of documenting the photographer’s concepts which could\u2019ve just been written down [3]<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, Weston Neff, the Met\u2019s photography curator at the time, bought the whole 200 print set to gift to the Met\u2019s permanent collection. Nan Goldin also told Shore that American Surfaces<\/em> left a significant impression on her as a student [2]<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Santa Rosa, New Mexico, June 1972. Stephen Shore<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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New York City, New York, September-October 1972. Stephen Shore<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

American Surfaces<\/em> deals with photographing the seemingly mundane, such as plates with food, simple faces, and dirty toilet seats, across America to reveal an intimate and well-rounded portrait of Shore\u2019s trip across America. These photos speak to the average American, showing the small bits of life that everyone experiences but never really gets represented in art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This theme is what I will be exploring on my own short road trip from Ann Arbor to North Carolina, stopping along the way to document the little stories found in everyday scenes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<\/div>

Methodology<\/h2>\n
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Following in the footsteps of his mentor, Andy Warhol, Stephen Shore allowed everything that passed by him to be interpreted as art. Shooting with color film and a 35 mm camera, Shore photographed raw and natural images that mimicked exactly what he saw: people, streets, gas stations, food, etc. on his road trip from New York to Texas.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shore’s method of photographing as seeing is discussed in the interview below, Stephen Shore: Taking photographs that “feel like seeing”<\/em>, from which I drew inspiration and learned more about how to replicate his perspective in photos.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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