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Stephen Shore

Stephen Shore Quotes

Photographer

Stephen Shore is an influential American photographer born on October 8, 1947. Known for his unique photographic style and his portrayal of American landscapes, his work often explores the essence of photography and the boundary between reality and fiction.

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Famous Stephen Shore Quotes

“With a painting, you're taking basic building blocks and making something that's more complex than what you started with. It is a synthetic process. A photograph does the opposite: It takes the world, and puts an order on it, simplifies it.”

World Doe Order Process Building Painting Photography Opposites Complexes Photographer Photograph Block Simplify Building Blocks Synthetic

Author:Stephen Shore

“Why can't a photograph be all four things at once? -be an art object; be a document, what ever that means exactly, but deal with content; be a formalist exploration; and operate on some, metaphor is not the right word but, resonant level.”

Mean Art Levels Deals Four Objects Photographer Photograph Metaphor Exploration Documents Right Words

Author:Stephen Shore

“I think most serious photographers understand that there's this large gap between the world and how the world looks through a photograph.”

Thinking World Looks Serious Photographer Photograph Gaps

Author:Stephen Shore

“There's something essentially fictive about a photograph. That doesn't mean that if you understand that, and you understand how the world is transformed by the camera, that you can't use the limitations or the transformation to have an observation that is a very subtle perception of the world.”

Ifs World Mean Use Perception Transformation Cameras Photograph Observation Limitation Subtle Transformed Perception Of The World

Author:Stephen Shore

“I realize that as I get more experience as I get older, my perception changes and that feeds the photograph.”

Realizing Perception Photograph

Author:Stephen Shore

“I don't know how much a photograph can add to a biography, the way a film or writing or narrative medium could. Because it's a frozen image.”

Writing Film Photograph

Author:Stephen Shore

“The context in which a photograph is seen affects the meaning the viewer draws from it.”

Draws Photograph Viewers

Author:Stephen Shore

“A photograph has edges the world does not.”

World Doe Photograph Edges

Book:The nature of photographs

Source: The nature of photographs

“A quote that I like very much comes close to explaining my attitude about taking photographs. ‘Chinese poetry rarely trespasses beyond the bounds of actuality the great Chinese poets accept the world exactly as they find it in all its terms and with profound simplicity they seldom talk about one thing in terms of another; but are able enough and sure enough as artists to make the ultimately exact terms become the beautiful terms.’”

World Enough Able Beautiful Artist Term Attitude Accepting One Thing Poet Profound Bounds Photograph Simplicity Chinese Explaining My Attitude Actuality

Author:Stephen Shore

“There's something arbitrary about taking a picture. So I can stand at the edge of a highway and take one step forward and it can be a natural landscape untouched by man and I can take one step back and include a guardrail and change the meaning of the picture radically... I can take a picture of a person at one moment and make them look contemplative and photograph them two seconds later and make them look frivolous.”

“Photographers have to impose order, bring structure to what they photograph. It is inevitable. A photograph without structure is like a sentence without grammar-it is incomprehensible, even inconceivable.”

Order Photography Structure Photographer Photograph Sentences Inevitable Comparison Grammar Imposing Incomprehension

Author:Stephen Shore

About the Author

Born: October 8, 1947
Known for: Photographer
Quotes: 35

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Photography Photograph Photographer World Looks Art Order Thinking Artist Cameras I Can Ifs Mean Mediums Natural People Perception Persons Problem Seeing

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