Stephen Shore: The Nature of Photographs

In this book Stephen Shore looks at the different levels of looking at and reading photographs using both his own work and that of other photographers, both historical and contemporary.

Main points and observations (in yellow):-

• Asks the question 'What are the charachteristics of photographyu that establish how an image looks?'
• Explores how photographs function.
• A photograph can be explored on different levels:

1. The Physical level; a physical object: print (or digital image on a screen perhaps)
2. The Depictive level
3. The Mental level

The Physical Level

• The physical qualities of the print or monitor determine the visual qualities of the image.
• They are flat, static and bounded by edges, i.e. the frame
• The type of black and white emulsion determines the hue and tonal range of the print and the type of base texture.  This doesn't work for digital images on a screen unless they are digitally printed but does the same hold true then?  How can we compare digital printing paper with old style wet printing paper?
• Colour extends the photograph's palette.
• Colour is more like how we see.  It has added description because it shows the colour of a culture or an age.  The included example by Anne Turyn was taken in 1986 but the colours suggest the 1960s.  This can easily be done digitally now as I did with my second set of images for assignment 2.
• The tonal range of a black and white print is affected by the emulsion of the paper and the chemistry of the film and developers.  Digitally this can be altered in processing and printing software.
• As an object a photograph has its own life in the world.

The Depictive Level

• Photography is an analytical discipline
• A painter starts with a blank canvas and builds a picture.
• A photographer works the other way round, starting with a muddled world and selects a picture - vantage point, framing, decisive moment, selecting a plane of focus.
• A photograph depicts an aspect of the world.
• On the depictive level there are four ways in which the world in front of the camera is transformed into a flat image: flatness, frame, time and focus.
• They are the means by which photographers express their sense of the world.

Flatness

• A 2D image can be made to have an illusion of depth
• Some photographs are opaque - the viewer is stopped by the picture plane.  No apparent depth created by perspective. eg Thomas Struth page 45.
• Some are transparent - the viewer is drawn through the surface into the illusion of the image.  Perspective.  Thomas Struth p. 46/7
• The point of view affects the image significantly

Frame

• A photograph has edges, the world does not.
• The edges separate what is in the picture and what is not.  Can be altered post capture either under the enlarger or digitally.

Timing

• Timing can be short and freeze movement or lengthy and blur the image.
• The Decisive moment.  Planned or happy accident?  Now much easier with the ease of continuous shooting.  Was possible before with motor drives on film cameras, but expensive.

Focus

• Depth of field determines how an image looks.
• View cameras with bellows allow the plane of focus to be manipulated.  As do the latest tilt and shift lenses.
• The point of focus concentrates the viewer's attention.

The Mental Level

• When reading a photograph, our eyes do not refocus as the image is flat/2D.
• It is our mental focus that is shifting
• The mental level elaborates, refines and embellishes our perceptions of the depictive level.