A picture by New York photographer Jerry Shore, profiled in this week's New Yorker by staff writer Adam Gopnik, and accompanied by an image slideshow. I'm not totally sold on Shore's work -- the image above being a notable exception, a picture I'd be proud to make -- but Gopnik's contextualization of Shore's practice made me, reading in bed at 4 a.m., with the cats propped up nearby, listening to a mixture of snow and freezing rain landing outside on the balcony in the dark, sit instantly upright and alert. Gopnik's is one of the better non- artworld insider essays I've read on photography, and the paragraphs reproduced below are as accurate a description of the "conceptual impulse"(s) behind my own pictures as any I've ever found.

Adam Gopnik:

"Shore’s photography is, to use the ever-reductive language of art criticism, an attempt to reconcile the subject matter of the New York school of black-and-white street photography of the fifties—the love of the overlooked, the stray, the strange, the gutter, and the slummy—with the high finish and compositional poise of the Meyerowitz-Eggleston school of color photography. His own ambitions for his photographs seem to have been almost purely formal and even abstract: though he was always on the streets, he never saw himself as a documentary street photographer, in the familiar Eugene Richards sense. His attention was devoted to space and color and form. And, to be sure, it is the organization of the pictures that first strikes one—what was called, in formalism’s rosier days, their interpenetrating planes and surprising deep space.

But it’s the descriptive bits of the pictures which register most strongly. Dignity opens the door to sadness. Just as each Atget façade is a study in shape and space and gleaming particulate light but is also about a Paris that was passing, or stilled, so in Shore the will to memorialize the commonplace mirrors our own sense of how things we love get lost, and can be recalled only in pictures."

Later, Gopnik offers further criteria of his own for judging and evaluating Shore's work, which I reproduce without comment, because I'm still trying to decide what larger implications they have for contemporary photographic practice:

1. "[A] city, so recognizable that sight alone becomes a kind of love, is opened up before us in these pictures. The peeling billboards and the plastic bags are all registered, as a camera can register things, neither as subjects, made emotional by the artist’s will, nor as objects, emptied of meaning at the artist’s whim. They’re just there, as uncontroversial as crabgrass."

2. "The sense of things ugly in themselves—ugliness registered not defiantly but passively, as if nothing could be truly ugly—filled his work."
- posted by cjb @ 10:19 AM