Week 4 [Reading Notes] - Stephen Shore and 'The Nature of Photographs'

Reading Notes:

Shore, S. (2007) 'The Deceptive Level' in The Nature of Photographs by Stephen Shore: A Primer. 2nd edn. New York: Phaidon Press. pp. 36-95

Photography is inherently an analytic discipline. Where a painter starts with a blank canvas and builds a picture, a photographer starts with the messiness of the world and selects a picture.

A photographer standing before houses, streets, people, trees and artefacts of a culture imposes an order on the scene - simplifies the jumble by giving it structure. He or she imposes this order by choosing a vantage point, choosing a frame, choosing a moment of exposure, and by selecting a plane of focus.

The formal character of the image is a result of a range of physical and optical factors. These are the factors that define the physical level of the photograph. But on the depictive level, there are four central ways in which the world in front of the camera is transformed into the photograph: flatness, frame, time and focus.

These four attributes mentioned above define the pictures' depictive content and structure. They form the basis of a photograph's visual grammar. They are responsible for the snap shooter's 'mistakes': a blur, a beheading, a jumble, an awkward moment. They are the means by which photographer's express their sense of the world, give structure to their perceptions and articulation of their meanings.

The first means of transformation is flatness. The world is a 3-D; a photographic image is 2-D. Because of this flatness, the depth of the depictive space always bears a relationship to the picture plane. The picture plane is a field upon which the lens's image is projected. A photographic image can rest on this picture plane and, at the same time, contain an illusion of deep space.

- Photographs have (with the exception of stereo pictures) monocular vision - one definite vantage point. They do not have the depth perception our binocular vision affords us.

- When 3D space is project monocularly onto a plane, relationships are created that did not exist before the picture was taken. Things in the back of the picture are brought into juxtaposition with things in the front. Any change in the vantage point results in a change in the relationships.

- Some photographs are opaque. The viewer is stopped by the picture plane. Some photographs are transparent. The viewer is drawn through the surface into the illusion of the image.

- In the field, outside the controlled confines of a studio, a photographer is confronted with a complex web of visual juxtapositions that realign themselves with each step the photographer takes.

The next transformative element is the frame. A photograph has edges; the world does not. The edges separate what is in the pictures from what is not. The frame corrals the content of the photography all at once. The objects, people, events, or forms that are in the forefront of a photographer's attention when making the fine framing decisions are the recipients of the frames emphasis. The frame resonates off them and, in turn, draws the viewer's attention to them. The relationships that edges create are both visual and 'contentual'.

- For some pictures, the frame acts passively. It is where the picture ends. The structure of the picture begins within the image and works its way out of the frame.

Someone saying 'cheese' when having a portrait made acknowledges unconsciously the way time is transformed in a photograph. A photograph is static, but the world flows in time. As this flow in interrupted by the photograph, a new meaning, a photographic meaning, is delineated. 

- Two factors affect time in a photograph: the duration of the exposure and the staticness of the final image. Just as a 3D world is transformed when it is projected onto a flat piece of film, so a fluid world is transformed when it is projected on to a static piece of film. The exposure has a duration, what John Szarkowski in The Photographer's Eye called 'a discrete parcel of time'.

- The duration of exposure could be:
1/10,000th sec = Frozen time: an exposure of short duration, cutting across the grain of time, generating a new moment.
2 secs = Extrusive time: the movement occurring in front of the camera, or movement of the camera itself, accumulating on the film, producing a blur.
6 mins = Still time: the content is at rest and time is still.

Focus is the fourth major transformation in the world of the photograph. Not only does a camera see monocularly from a definite vantage point; it also creates a hierarchy in the depictive place by defining a single place of focus. This plane, which is usually parallel with the picture plane, gives emphasis to part of the picture and helps distil a photograph's subject from its content.

- The spatial hierarchy generated by the plane of focus can be eliminated only by photographing a flat subject that is itself parallel to the picture plane.

- The hierarchal emphasis created by the plane of focus can be minimised by increasing the D.o.F. But there is still one plane that is in focus, with space before and behind rendered with diminishing sharpness. There is a gravitation of attention to the plane of focus. Attention to focus concentrates our attention.