“I went on to Flickr and it was just thousands of pieces of shit, and I just couldn’t believe it. And it’s just all conventional, it’s all cliches, it’s just one visual convention after another.”
Stephen Shore
Lets face it, most photography is crap (that includes most of mine). The good stuffs really hard to find let alone make, so I'm not surprised Shore didn't find what he was looking for on Flickr. I have a sneaking suspicion that his mind was already made up before he saw his first reflection, flower & cat .He left with what he came for but what did he actually learn? What does anybody learn when their minds made up before they've seen the evidence
It was John Szarkowski that gave Shore his chance. A valuable lesson to take from Szarkowski was that he never talked about work he didn't like, he focused all his attention on good work and he championed it. It's the harder path to take as talking about why photographs work is much harder than talking about why they don't.
"He that cometh to seek after knowledge, with a mind to scorn, shall be sure to find matter for his humour, but no matter for his instruction."
Sir Francis Bacon: Advancement of Learning, Book I (1605)
Sean
No comments:
Post a Comment