Stephen Shore: Photos and Stories

Charlie Melcher 

Hi, I’m Charlie Melcher, founder of the Future of StoryTelling. Thanks for joining me today for a very special episode of the FoST podcast. At FoST, we have the pleasure of working with artists and storytellers across all forms of media. But photography is one that is particularly near and dear to my heart. I began studying photography as an art form as an undergraduate at Yale in the mid 1980s. At the time, there was no venue for students to publish their work on campus. So I decided to start a photography magazine. Black and White: the Yale Undergraduate Photography Review was my first publishing endeavor. Engaging in the creative act of editing, designing and printing that magazine and participating in the community that coalesced around it made me realize what I truly wanted to do with my life: to use my head, hands and heart, to make meaningful and beautiful things, and to bring a community together around a shared passion and purpose. Through photography, I found my calling. It was during those formative years that I first met today’s guest, Stephen Shore, who became a lifelong friend and mentor. Stephen has been lauded as one of the most important photographers of our time, known for his deceptively beautiful color images, his thoughtful writing about the medium, his devotion to pedagogy, and his determination to never stop finding new visual problems to solve. He was the first living photographer to have a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. And he’s had two solo shows at MoMA, the first in 1972, and the second in 2017, as well as numerous other exhibitions, and museums and galleries. He’s been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and American Academy in Rome fellowship, the Royal Photographic Society honorary fellowship, and a culture award from the German Society of Photography. He’s published more than 25 books, including one of my favorite books of all time, the seminal “Uncommon Places,” and he’s been the director of the photography program at Bard since 1982. Stephen is someone who has dedicated his life to the art of photography, the pursuit of understanding how the medium works, what sets it apart, and what questions that uniquely positioned to answer. Given our shared passion for the medium. I’m truly looking forward to talking with him about his life, his craft, and the second edition of his book, modern instances, which comes out this month. Please join me in giving a warm welcome to Stephen Shore.

Charlie Melcher 

Stephen, it’s such a pleasure and an honor to have you on the Future of StoryTelling podcast. Welcome. Thanks, Charlie.

Stephen Shore 

I’m looking forward to it.

Charlie Melcher 

So there’s this old adage that a picture is worth 1000 words. Yes. I wonder Do you think that a photograph tells a story?

Stephen Shore 

I don’t think a photograph tells the story. I think there is some photographs that imply a narrative that look like a film still, and imply a narrative the way a film still might imply a narrative. But actually tell a story. No, and not even a sequence of pictures does it very well. I mean, you can do it in a rudimentary way. But it’s not really telling a very complex story, compared to, to what a film can do. You know, there’s a, an Amazon ad on television right now. And it’s a young couple, and they have a fight. And he goes off, and console himself. He buys some fitness equipment on Amazon, and she buys a dress, and then they go out. And she goes out to a party. But then she comes they both come home. And in their separate apartments. They both watch romantic movies on Amazon Prime. And then he goes to her door and they get together. It takes 30 seconds. And it’s much more complex a story than a Life magazine picture story.

Charlie Melcher 

So there’s something that film does that’s more complete, or more powerful storytelling.

Stephen Shore 

It’s an– it’s narrative, because it flows in time, because a novel does, because theater does. It can do things that a single photograph can’t do. But this isn’t a flaw of photography, it’s one of its prime features is that the image is decontextualized. It is taken out of the flow of time, it’s taken out of the continuity of space. A photographer who understands how the world that we see and experience is translated into a photograph gets to use the medium to do what it does.

Charlie Melcher 

I just recently completed reading and really enjoyed your book, Modern Instances. One of the topics that I found so interesting was the discussion of the act of making a frame, that decision that a photographer makes of sort of where to draw the edges and what to leave out. Talk a little bit about that?

Stephen Shore 

Well, it’s in a way, the first decision a photographer makes. The frame has many functions in the photograph. The simplest one is what you described: drawing a line between what’s in and what’s out. But it’s not as simple as that. Because unless you’re working in a studio with a white paper background, it’s always cutting things off. The edges are never clean. And because of that, there’s always the question of, how much do you show on the edge of something being cut off? How does the edge create structure in the picture? As something–as a line is near the edge, there’s a little vibration between that line and the edge. Step back a foot and it changes. Move a foot closer, and it may disappear. And so it is the beginning of defining what the content of the picture is. And it’s the beginning of defining what the structure of the picture is.

Charlie Melcher 

In your opinion, there is a dialogue or there isn’t a dialogue that you’re intentionally having between you’re making of the image, and the viewers reading of the image?

Stephen Shore 

When I’m in the midst of photographing, I’m not thinking about that. I’m just, I’m just totally immersed in the process.

Charlie Melcher 

There was an interesting section in the book about structure versus composition, and what photography does versus, say, painting.

Stephen Shore 

It had always struck me when people talk about a composition of the picture. I know what they mean. But the word never sat right. The word “compose” comes from a Latin root, companere, which means to put together. The word “synthesis” comes from a Greek root, syntithenai, which also means to put together. Composition is describing a synthetic process. For example, a painting: you start with a blank canvas, and every mark you make on the canvas adds complexity to it. That’s synthetic process. A photographer does almost the opposite. They start with the whole world. And every decision they make brings order to it, starting with where the frame goes. And in this way, photography isn’t synthetic, it’s analytic. If I look at words, describing analytic processes, I think of things like solution. Solving a picture seems more a description of what it feels like doing it than composing one.

Charlie Melcher 

You use this phrase: a photographer doesn’t put together an image, a photographer selects an image.

Stephen Shore 

Yes. After a photographer has had a good bit of experience with the medium, seeing the world, taking a picture, seeing the result, over and over again, in different situations– there is a sense that their state of mind can be impressed upon the picture. Their sense of space, the clarity with which they’re seeing all the subtleties of their state of mind, the subtleties of their perception, guide the decisions they make. Exactly where to stand, what angle to the to the light as it reflects off things, exactly where the frame goes– that these decisions become finely guided by the state of mind that the photographer.

Charlie Melcher 

You introduce a concept which I hadn’t been familiar with which you refer to as “objective correlative.”

Stephen Shore 

This is a phrase used by TS Eliot, in an essay he wrote about Hamlet, and I don’t have to In front of me, I do have, I could find–

Charlie Melcher 

I actually have it here too.

Stephen Shore 

You want to just read it? This is what TS Eliot wrote.

Charlie Melcher 

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an objective correlative. In other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events, which shall be the formal of that particular motion, such that when the external facts which must terminate and sensory experience are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.

Stephen Shore 

Yes, I was interested in it because 100 years ago, Alfred Stieglitz did a series of pictures of clouds that he called “Equivalence.” He photographed clouds, because he wanted to remove the photograph from the subjective reaction to content. When you photograph a car, and people have reactions to cars in a different way than they might may have to clouds. He wrote that he wanted the pictures to be more like music. And I, in trying to describe this to students, other words don’t exactly touch it. It’s sort of like a metaphor, but it’s not a metaphor. It’s sort of like a symbol, but it’s not a symbol. And the closest thing that I’ve come to the description of it is the objective correlative– that it does something to you by experiencing it.

Charlie Melcher 

And that’s what you feel is happening successfully in a photograph when somebody has an emotional response to it.

Stephen Shore 

Yes, and it’s not just emotional. It could be– although Elliot was talking about emotional response, I think it goes beyond that. A larger psychological response. The only time I had the opportunity of hearing Walker Evans speak–and let me add that no one had a greater influence on my photography, than Walker Evans, whose work I first encountered when I was, I was given a book of his for my 10th birthday–I only heard him speak once. And it was in 1971, at the time of his large retrospective at MoMA. And the central point of his talk was to talk about his work as transcendent documents, which I was not expecting to hear. And what he was talking about was his photographs in a way as equivalence. And one way that I found of perhaps, better elucidating, how the connection between or the difference between Stieglitz’s idea of equivalent, being associated with music, a more abstract medium, and the Walker Evans, is that a lot of music has words. And those words aren’t abstract. Those words have real life associations. And yet it still–it still can have the emotional and psychological resonance of music. And I think that’s what Walker Evans was getting at. And that’s what I think a lot of the best photographers can do, that they’re looking out at the world and being sensitive to internal states at the same time.

Stephen Shore 

I never knew that you had received a book of Walker Evans photographs when you were 10 years old. First of all, that’s not a normal gift for a 10 year old. And perhaps that helps to explain why you became so precocious as a photographer. I mean, your career young career was more than most people could dream to accomplish in their entire lives. Tell us a little bit about your early life as a photographer, let’s save the time you spent at Warhols factory, and then up to your one man show at the Met.

Stephen Shore 

So I started very young. And I feel very fortunate that there have been a number of people who influenced my life through gifts or other associations that completely changed the course of my life. And it begins with an uncle of mine, my mother’s brother, who knowing that I had an interest in chemistry when I was five, for my sixth birthday, gave me a Kodak darkroom set. Now, let me add that I’m on Instagram, and I post fairly regularly. And last month I posted or actually was in July, I posted a series of pictures that I had made exactly 50 years before. My birthday is October 8. On October 8, I’m going to post a picture that I printed as a result of this gift 70 years before. So I wasn’t taking pictures, I was taking–using my family’s brownie Hawkeye negatives and printing them. And I did this for a couple of years before I started taking pictures, and then the summer that I was eight I got a manual 35 millimeter rangefinder camera. And the rest is history but also I–it’s like, I feel like in a certain way I was destined to do it. When I was 14, I approached Edward Steichen to show him my work.

Charlie Melcher 

Of course you did.

Stephen Shore 

You know, pushy young New Yorker, knowing little sense of restraint. So for whatever reason, he was very gracious, bought three of my prints. In my junior and senior year in high school, I became interested in film and started going to film screenings almost every day. I don’t even know how I pulled this off. I really had stopped going to school. Typically seeing two movies a day. There were great theaters in New York then. The Bleecker Street Cinema had mostly European or South American, Asian films. About the same time, Jonas Meka’s opened the Film Maker’s Cinematheque, which had what might be I guess, called avant garde films. And I made an eight millimeter film that was shown there the same night that Warhol premiered The Life of Juanita Castro, and I was introduced to him. And I– The Factory was famous at the time in New York circles, I asked to come and photograph and he said, Yes. And I spent three years there. At that point, I realized I couldn’t maintain the pretense of being a student and told the school I was in and my parents that I was dropping out.

Charlie Melcher 

And this was high school you dropped out of?

Stephen Shore 

Yeah, this this is my senior year in high school.

Charlie Melcher 

And you didn’t go on to college? Right?

Stephen Shore 

No, but I–my college was on East 47th Street between second and third avenues. Yeah, the other thing I got from him, is, you know, people think– if I do interviews about that period, people want to hear about the parties and the drugs. Andy worked every day. And he, he had a work table, like a four by eight plywood, work table, and he’d come in, in the early afternoon, and he had projects every day. And some people like to create in solitude. He didn’t. He drew energy from people around him. And this is why The Factory existed. He wanted people around him. And he would involve them in what he was doing. And so, let’s say he’s working on the cow wallpaper and trying different color combinations. So you’d say, oh, Stephen, which color do you like? And having other people around focusing on what he’s doing, and he was getting energy from that. But what I got from it was, I saw how an artist makes decisions. I got to see in a day by day way, so an artist who worked every day, make aesthetic decisions and play with things. Try something. This didn’t work, try something else. And to see this, over a three year period, I came away with an understanding of aesthetic intentionality, and the creative process.

Charlie Melcher 

Incredible, incredible experience. And then, after working there and working on films with him and photographing, how did you then end up eventually getting a one man show it at the Met?

Stephen Shore 

Well, I was an ambitious young man. And my ambition went beyond being an acolyte of Warhol’s. I saw people for whom this was their life– like this was, this was their claim to identity, was to be a follower, to be hanging out at the Factory, to be in the group that he took to parties every night. And I just had more personal ambition than that. And so at some point, I realized I have to leave. This is not–this is not my golden age. I’m only 19, by the time I left, you know, 18. Through my association with him I became very interested in serial imagery and also became interested in with a lot of conceptual art and began doing conceptually based sequences. So I brought them to the Met to John McKendree who was, it was then the Department of Prints and Photographs. And he said, Come back in a week. And I did. And he had one of them framed, which I wasn’t expecting, because the Met didn’t show living artists. It was their policy. And what I didn’t know was, this was 1970, the 100th anniversary of the founding, and the Trustees decided to change their policy and begin to show living artists. And the first show was sculpture by Jules Olitzki. The second show was collages by Joseph Cornell and I was the third show.

Charlie Melcher 

And you are how old then?

Stephen Shore 

20…23, I guess? And it was a shock. I mean, it’s like, on one hand, your dreams come true. And then it’s like, then what do you do? And I was really, I think, emotionally unprepared for the that experience.

Charlie Melcher 

I mean, it must have been a little bit like an athlete winning the Olympics at 23, and then maybe retiring or wondering, what am I gonna do now that I’ve got a gold medal?

Stephen Shore 

Or maybe it’s related to the Sports Illustrated curse, that, you know, when your picture’s on the cover of Sports Illustrated, then you flop after that. And so it forced me to go into a new direction. I mean, I saw this as work in progress. And the progress stopped. I mean, it really was a shock.

Charlie Melcher 

So you and I met, first of all, when I was a student at Yale, and that was really informative period in my life, because I was very actively studying photography, as a form of storytelling. So even though we started this conversation with you saying you don’t think photos or stories or even sequences of photos, I remember at that point, sitting down in the art and architecture library and taking out Lee Friedlander’s Factory Valleys. Beautifully printed book, beautiful collection of photos, and studying that page by page, image by image, thinking through why this sequence of photographs appeared in this way, what were the decisions, what were the sort of story that was being told by Lee Friedlander. And then I actually wrote my senior thesis on Robert Frank’s The Americans. And I was trying to bring a kind of critical practice to a sequence of pictures to a to a collection in a very seminal photography book. And I wonder about, well, several questions here. But one, you mentioned the Walker Evans book, that you received a 10– were there other books of photographs that were major influences for you?

Stephen Shore 

So in the late 60s, I was sequencing my work for a catalog, a Swedish catalog of Warhol’s first big European retrospective, and the the editor of the catalog when we finished sequencing my picture said I have something to show you. And we’re at a loft in Soho, with big open space and he laid out Ed Ruscha’s book, Every Building on Sunset Strip, which is accordion shape. And it’s every building on Sunset Strip, as the title implies, and I saw how the kind of conceptual frameworks I was thinking about at the time, and bookmaking and aesthetic intention all came together and went to the best contemporary art bookstore in the city, which was Wittenborn and Company on Madison Avenue between 78th and 79th. And went there and got all of the Ruscha books at the time. But that this happened later, and this was the beginning of the the post Warhol phase in my work.

Charlie Melcher 

It’s amazing to me how the book as a art form itself, the photo book, has become so popular and so revered. When I started my career, first job out of college at Aperture creating photo books, I would have never guessed that 25 years later, it would still be thriving. I would have thought it would be out of business as a field. And to the contrary, there are dozens of photo book publishers around the world, making a living and turning out beautiful work. And I wonder if you have thoughts as to why this has thrived and been accepted.

Stephen Shore 

I think a few years ago, some photo book publishers experimented with digital books and no one wanted them. Some people like the physical object of a photo book, I would assume art books too. But photography books– the surface of a photograph is very similar. It’s a kind of nondescript surface. And it’s the same kind of surface as a reproduction in a book, as opposed to say, on some Kiefer painting, where there’s no way to reproduce the experience of a key for painting for getting scale. And there could be scale issues and photography books too. But just the physical experience of a Kiefer, where he is attended to every square inch of the surface, and the surface is dense, and three dimensional. It can’t be reproduced. photography book can. Also photographers are prolific. How many paintings does Kieffer do in a year? How many photographs do I take in a year? And so my–the photographer’s work tends to fall into bodies of work in a way that’s maybe unique to the medium, and book becomes a perfect form to gather it.

Charlie Melcher 

I was struck by a couple of other things as well. One is that the digital age probably enhances the desire for the physical object, as you said, no one wants more digital files. Another is that there happens to be an opportunity now for these publishers to reach directly to their collectors to the audience. So they can go and sell, they can do smaller runs, sell them at higher prices, and sell them directly and not have lose half the revenue to the bookstores. And then I think on top of that, a lot of photographers realize that it’s a more permanent and popular, you know, be distributed in long lasting form than even say a big show. I mean, I was talking to the head of photography at MoMA. He was just saying how many of the photographers he talks to are more interested in the book than the exhibit now. Because they know that it’ll be seen worldwide. And it’ll be around for, you know, a long, long time as opposed to three or four months for a show. And, and then of course, I think there is something very special about being able to play with the form, and the material nature and the quality of the reproductions and so many interesting creative decisions that get made when you’re designing and manufacturing a book as well. One thing I did note, as I was thinking about you being influenced by Every Building on Sunset Strip–you actually published a collection of postcards.

Stephen Shore 

10 Highlights of Amarillo, Texas. And half the cards were kind of civic highlights that would probably have existed already as postcards. The main street–I mean, these are classic postcard subjects– the Main Street. For some reason, hospitals often appear in postcards. The tallest building in town. The Civic Center. The county courthouse. And then the other half were quirky local places like Doug’s barbecue, which my Amarillo friends thought was the best barbecue in town, or the Double Dip which was a drive-in ice cream place so you go on dates to. I went to the largest printer of postcards in the country, Dexter Press. And Wittenborn, the bookstore that sold the Ed Ruscha books agreed to put a postcard rack up for me and sell the postcards. And I was convinced that what the New York art world wanted were postcards of Amarillo, Texas. They would just love them.

Charlie Melcher 

[laughs] Eat them up.

Stephen Shore 

They would absolutely eat them up. And so I had 5600 sets printed, which was 56,000 cards. And Wittenborn sold none.

Charlie Melcher 

Well, their loss and my gain you were very kind to give me a set years ago.

Stephen Shore 

I was interested in postcards and snapshots, not out of any kind of low art snobbishness because there was something often very genuine about them. That while snapshots often had their own conventions, every now and then you come across one that felt like an immediate experience, where someone who was unschooled in photography was simply recording something that meant something to them without trying to be art. And with postcards, these were not usually untutored photographers, these are often a local professional. But it was not about self expression. If the High Low motel in Northern California hires you to take a picture, you want it to–you want to show the motel in a as clear away as possible. So the the the driving motivation was, in fact, clarity and the structural decisions, where to stand, how much to include what light to photograph it in, we’re all guided by the desire to make clear what this what this building looked like. And it wasn’t an end, if the photographer tried to do something, quote, creative, that drew attention to their own artistic process. It would, it would run against the desires of the people at the motel who are hiring. And so that simple clarity, I found I learned a lot from producing work in the form of a postcard. And then the following year, I did a series called “American Surfaces,” which were exhibited as Kodak made snapshots. I understood that I was taking the cultural reference of that form, and drawing it to the work.

Charlie Melcher 

I would imagine with somebody who had such success early on, that it would be tempting to just sort of replicate what you had become known for. You tell a story in the book about a dinner with Ansel Adams, perhaps a drunk Ansel Adams and some comments he made? Would you mind sharing that?

Stephen Shore 

Yes. So I went to dinner with with Ansel, and this was, I think, in 1976, he was 85. And I was 28, or 29, or something. And he–I saw him drink six tumblers of straight vodka. And he at one point said, “I had a creative hot streak in the 40s. And since then, I’ve been pot boiling.” And he didn’t say it in a morose way. He said it just like someone eighty-five observing their life. An artists can go on a creative hot streak, and do revolutionary work, create a new paradigm of seeing. And then it stops. Photographers, if you devoted your life to the medium and thought of yourself as well, I’m planning on being a photographer, and look back at what one’s predecessors have done. This was something that friends of mine, and I recognized and discussed. With that in mind, I understood that when I ever found myself copying myself, kind of doing it by rote, I would just stop, because I didn’t want to be in that position. And so I wonder if there’s something that is related to the nature of an analytic discipline that a young person can see things in a way and make connections that as we get older, the neural pathways get hardened. I did two bodies of work that I think really saw things freshly, and one was American surfaces and the other was so commonplaces. I’m not sure that I ever am going to do that again. Just because I I understand that doesn’t mean I can’t continue to produce. And I in the book refer to a passage in Bob Dylan’s book chronicles because if you look at the period of his life, between the writing of Blowing in the Wind, and Visions of Johanna and Mr. Tambourine Man, it was just, it was miraculous, the music he was creating. And he said, he could never do that again. That to do that you had to have let me see if I can find it. He said those kinds of songs were written under different circumstances and circumstances never repeat themselves. Not exactly. I couldn’t get to those kinds of songs today. To do it, you have to have power and dominion over the spirits. I had done it once and once was enough. I talked about the emotional shock of the show at the Met, the emotional shock of that hot streak, which lasted about a decade, stopping the car machines that drove this process for years, at one point stopped arising and I am saying arising because that’s how it felt. It wasn’t like I’m sitting thinking, what am I going to do next? It was like I was compelled from something. I don’t know where it came from. And then it stopped, which was very upsetting. But what I realized in retrospect is that those questions were answered, and that at that point, I had mastered the formal understanding of the medium. And now I could, I could repeat myself, I could long for those days, and that I was doing that and make work in that mode. Or I could move on to something else, which is a different way of mastering a medium.

Charlie Melcher 

But I also have always tremendously respected the fact that you never did sit on your laurels. And you have been somebody who’s brought curiosity and sort of new challenges to your work and not been scared to change it up and try new things. I mean, for example, being an early adopter, using a phone to take pictures, you mentioned that you once had a conversation with John Szarkowski, about the difference between illustration and photography, that he said, an illustration is a picture whose problems were solved before the picture was made.

Stephen Shore 

So what he was saying, essentially, is that a work of art is itself the solution to the problem, that the act of making it is an attempt at the solution. Not that the solution was arrived at before and then you simply make it.

Charlie Melcher 

So we also have to talk about technology, because one of the ways that you’ve kept yourself trying new things, and exploring and growing and asking new questions was by using new tools, and certainly the different tools allow for different types of formal expression. And and you again, mentioned something in in the book referencing, again, John Szarkowski, and his introduction to photography until now about his relating Auguste Renoir’s story to his son about the use of paint in tubes.

Stephen Shore 

So the story is that, late in Auguste Renoir’s life, he had a conversation with his son, Jean Renoir, the great filmmaker, and he told his son, that if it weren’t for paint in tubes, there wouldn’t have been Impressionism. People wouldn’t have been able to go out of the studio and paint from life in the world. And Szarkowski goes on to say, he isn’t saying that paint in tubes invented Impressionism, but and he said, perhaps it was the desire of painters to go out in the world and out of the studio, that led to the development of painting tubes. But whatever it is, there was a symbiosis. And I find this true of the technological developments in photography, that as much as any medium, tied to the tools we use, and that if a camera can do something new, it’s not interesting simply because it’s new. It’s interesting, because it means something can be said with it. That couldn’t be had been said before. In 2017. In the fall of the year, I, a large retrospective of mine opened at MoMA, and also on my mind, was the experience that I related to earlier of my show at the Met, and the emotional impact of that show. And so learning from that experience, I decided, Okay, I’m gonna just move on to a next body of work. That’s not in the MoMA show. And Hasselblad had just made in early, I guess, right at the beginning of 2017, a camera called the H1D handheld camera, just a little larger than a 35 millimeter that produced an image with resolution greater than an eight by 10 negative. And so I made I had a show at my gallery, 303 Gallery, during the MoMA show of this work, where I was making prints that were four by five and a half feet of close up details of things were things in the prints were larger than life size. And when the light was right, something Very special happened and they almost look three dimensional, that just becomes visually very vibrant. I couldn’t have made those pictures without hostile bloods invention, I wasn’t again interested in it as a novelty. You know, for 30 years, the main camera I used was an eight by ten view camera, it meant I had to work on a tripod. Because of the focal length of a normal lens, a normal lens on an eight by 10 is 300 millimeters or 305 millimeters. Depth of field is very low, and I have to–you have to stop down. And I’m often shooting an F 45, and F 64. Which means very long exposures, all of that’s limiting what I can photograph, I can’t photograph any action. And as I mentioned, a tie to a tripod now I have a camera that I can use as quickly as a 35 millimeter, I could take pictures of people on the street with it. I can focus as I said a foot and a half away and, and focus in a kind of offhand spontaneous way with it. And it’s producing a picture that’s hot has higher resolution than eight by ten negative. So I think it opened the door, it opened the door to an expression that couldn’t have existed before the camera was invented. The camera doesn’t make the picture though. The camera doesn’t think of what to do with it.

Charlie Melcher 

The technologies ask the question to you. These technologies were sort of challenging you to think new ways, push them in new ways.

Stephen Shore 

Yeah, and, in ’74 one of the pictures that I did for Uncommon Places that was actually the cover of the first 1982 edition was in the town of North Adams, Massachusetts. And it’s you see looking down a street with red brick, New England, factory buildings, and the town just comes to an end. And there is countryside at the end of the street. And I’ve been interested in this transition of how, what what it looks like for a city to end and countryside to begin or one neighborhood about another neighborhood. And it’s very rare that you can find a place at eye level like Holden street where you where you can not just understand it, but where a camera from a single vantage point can see it and describe it. And then I started playing with drones.

Charlie Melcher 

All that before you go to drones, I just have to say to you that Holden Street image in North Adams. My dad is was born in North Adams. That view, what you’re calling countryside, is actually a lot that had been taken down. It was an empty streets, you know, because the buildings have been removed. My grandfather had Melcher’s General Store sitting in that vacant lot.

Stephen Shore 

Amazing.

Charlie Melcher 

Isn’t that incredible? Literally, that is the exact corner where Melcher’s store was located.

Stephen Shore 

Amazing.

Charlie Melcher 

From my dad’s childhood and I never went to that store, but my father knew it. And because of it I, through you, was able to give him that picture and very different meaning for him.

Stephen Shore 

Amazing, amazing.

Charlie Melcher 

So sorry, I interrupted you, you were saying about now taking, using drones.

Stephen Shore 

From a drone, you can see clearly delineated these transitions and abutments of what it’s like for a river to go through a city what it’s like where an industrial neighborhood meets a residential neighborhood. What happens when train tracks go through a city. And so when the lockdown happened in, in 2020, I had two projects. One was to write the memoir, and my photographic project, we had a house in Montana and we went out there where the pandemic was less of a presence than it was in the Northeast. And my photographic project was flew out with a drone. And again, it’s they’re not unusual because their drone. There are 1000s and 1000s of people using drones. To make pictures. I’m using a very good one but a completely ordinary one. But it’s like it’s like any camera. What makes a picture interesting is what you do with it. But it allowed me to photograph these transitions that are clear from above. But are you can you understand them from my level, but you can’t they’re they’re rarely accessible to a camera at level.

Charlie Melcher 

Stephen, as I was reading the book, I was struck by how many times chance or happenstance played a major role in your life. Whether it was your uncle giving you the photography, developing kid at six, or some friend who came by and looked at your portfolio and made an off the cuff comment about, oh, they’re black and white. And all of a sudden, you started to think about shooting in color. So the fact that so much of this seems to happen by chance, or or happenstance that was profoundly impactful in your life. Photographers have to impose order, bring structure to what they photograph? Was this book an effort to bring some semblance of structure or order to your life?

Stephen Shore 

Wow, I hadn’t thought of that. I think that’s a fascinating observation, I think, yes. I didn’t think of it as a way of bringing structure, but I think it did. I mentioned in the introduction to the book, perhaps photographers look for the universal and the particular, I think that’s something that runs through the book for me also, that it’s not an autobiography. I’m discussing things only to the extent that I think they’re useful to other people.

Charlie Melcher 

Another thing that I left him feeling was one, that it was a great gift to those of us who read it. And to that it was filled with a sense of gratitude. I really felt that way, I think there was whether you were honoring your influences, or your wife, or, you know, your your uncle, you know, there there was or, or your mentors, you know, of whom there were many like there was a, there was a beautiful sense of giving and receiving and gratitude. And that was very moving. There’s a great moment where you you recount a little story of being in a taxi cab and listening to the cab driver complained about things that are happening in his life. And he turns to you and asked you what your philosophy of life is. And I thought maybe we could end by you sharing your philosophy of life.

Stephen Shore 

When he said that, I realized, I guess I was in probably in my mid 50s At the time, but I never stopped and thought about it. In that way. I never thought you know, what’s my philosophy of life, I just been living it. And so I had to, but I felt I owed this man, something because he had just been unburdening himself for the entire taxi ride. So three things came to mind. One is don’t be upset over things you have no control over. The second is life is fascinating if your work is something you love. And the third is, you’re very fortunate if you find a person you truly love.

Charlie Melcher 

Well, that all really resonates for me. The last two, I think I really personally live, the first one I aspire to. And that is, don’t sweat the things you can’t control.

Stephen Shore 

And I know you for enough years to know that the last two are exactly right, that you’re married to someone you truly love, and any enterprise you engage in– the Future of StoryTelling, your publishing, is something you love doing. And you know, we know you and I know that if you’re doing that, it doesn’t feel like work. It’s–you get up in the morning and you want to do it.

Charlie Melcher 

Stephen, I just wanted to say that I since I was a student and met you in college, that I’ve always really looked up to you and admired you and appreciate the role that you’ve played as a professional as an artist, as an educator, as a mentor. And I just wanted to say thank you for all of it. And thank you for being on the show with me and for everything else you’ve done.

Stephen Shore 

And let me say that I’ve had a number of conversations with people publicly about the book. I think what you brought to it was the most insightful. Thank you for inviting me, Charlie. It’s been a really interesting discussion.

Charlie Melcher 

Once again, I’m Charlie Melcher, and this has been the Future of StoryTelling podcast. Thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed the show. If storytelling is something that you’re passionate about, you’ve come to the right place. The future of storytelling is a community that celebrates stories in all forms, from traditional media to next generation technologies. In addition to this podcast, we offer our free monthly newsletter that delivers the best of storytelling across disciplines right to your inbox. And then there’s the FoST Explorers Club, an annual membership program that will take you to the greatest storytelling experiences around the world. You can learn more about both by going to our website at fost.org. The FoST podcast is produced by Melcher Media, in collaboration with our talented friends and production partners, Charts & Leisure. I hope to see you again soon for another deep dive into the world of storytelling. Until then, please be safe, stay strong and story on.