Shore's Filthy Photographs

When I was a kid it struck me as odd that I didn't see people using the bathroom on TV shows. They showed many other domestic situations. Families in the living room, or at the dinner table, or at school or work or driving somewhere, or countless other normal situations. But bathroom events were never shown. I knew the characters on these TV shows must have basic biological functions, and the fact that I couldn't witness them seemed artificial, and potentially problematic. What about the aliens receiving our TV signals millions of miles away? How would they know that any of us ever took a shit?

OK, news flash. TV sitcoms are fake. I knew this even as a kid. But the lack of toilets was a sort of trophy for me. I was proud of noticing it. It confirmed my suspicions that the strange world of adults was filtered, a lesson which still pays dividends in my life as a photographer. 

I thought of this recently while thumbing through my recently purchased American Surfaces, the classic book by Stephen Shore which contains an astonishing number of toilet photos. In fact I can't think of any other photo book with more. They range from your normal everyday john like this one.

Farmington, NM, June 1972

To decrepit cesspools like the one below.

N.M. 44, June 1972

Is that Shore's crap? His coffee? Why would a photographer include such a scene in a photo project? I mean sure, he spent a lot of time in bathrooms on his road trip. We all do. But why show those places? What was Shore getting at?

"It was the first time I’d been on the road alone, and it was all new,'" said Shore in an interview with Gil Blank. "I’d open a door, and there would be this bed. I’d get up in the morning and open the bathroom door, and there would be this toilet. I’d go to the diner and there would be this food on this surface, on this table. And it became clear within two or three days that I had the idea of doing a journal. The journal had certain categories — every meal I ate, every person I met, every bed I slept in."

Some toilets he even wound up shooting twice, such as the one below, first flushing and then non-flushing. The guy was on a serious shooting kick. I know. I've been there.

On the one hand, shooting the banal is nothing new. There's a conceit among photographers that a good photographer can elevate the everyday into the picturesque through sheer force of will. Not only does a good photographer notice photos in scenes the rest of us overlook, but he or she can convert those visions into something special. Whether it's Weston's peppers or Groover's silverware, the everyday scenes of Backhaus and Kawauchi, or the popularity of Instagram, that idea has been been with us forever. In fact I'd argue that it's the dominant aesthetic in art photography today as measured by any number of juried exhibitions. 

But I don't think that's what Shore's toilet photos are about. American Surfaces might focus on the everyday but the photos make no attempt to elevate subjects into anything beautiful. You'd never see a photo like the one below in a book by Backhaus or Kawauchi, or few other modern books for that matter. (Perhaps Templeton? Or Moriyama?) 

Clinton, OK, July 1972

"Some photographers go out and want to make beautiful photographs," says Shore in the interview. "I think that puts the cart before the horse. Good photographs are the by-product of some other exploration, or some other intention." In other words there's banal and then there's banal. There's striving for beauty, then there's the grimy rest stop toilet, always the by-product of some other intention.

Shore's work at the time was heavily influenced by Ed Ruscha. If he didn't set out to shoot every toilet on the Sunset Strip his outlook was similar. Shoot everything you come across, comprehensively, as is, with no attempt to glorify, nothing picturesque. Shore notes that the urge to document systematically was "maybe that was a Conceptualist remnant." Even so, that didn't help them find much of an audience forty years ago, and even contemporary reconsiderations of American Surfaces, for example this one, have weeded out the toilets. 

Santa Rosa, NM, June 1972

Looking back at that era William Eggleston is the banal snapshooter we remember as groundbreaking, while Shore didn't achieve real fame before switching to large format. Eggleston has called his photographic approach Democratic, but compared to Shore it seems far less representative. If Eggleston is the 1970s TV sitcom with toilets tucked safely out of view, American Surfaces is Big Brother, the uncut version. This is what democracy looks like.

Shore quoted in the Gil Blank interview: "One of the thoughts behind the Conceptualist work was that there’s this world out there that we experience, and that making it into a photograph necessitates the mediation of an artist. Almost inevitably, visual conventions come into play, so that what I see in the photograph is tied as much to visual conventions as any opportunity to see the rest of the world...every now and then I would see a photograph that would have that quality of an unmediated experience."

New York City, September-October 1972

Forty years after it was shot, American Surfaces seems rather visionary. Surely it anticipated the Google Street View projects of Rickard, Henner, Rafman, Wolf, et al. Some of the street scenes in the book are indistinguishable from GSV. Or the recent rash of books curating non-picturesque found photographs. Or this wearable camera which will photograph your entire life democratically. What these projects have in common along with Shore is their rejection of the conceit I mentioned earlier. Instead of looking for the beautiful in the everyday, they're cutting out the middleman and just depicting the everyday. 

If any direction in photography still holds promise, perhaps it's that one. I don't mean mindless automation. I mean that often the least manipulated reality is the most beautiful. Wasn't that Duchamp's lesson? Was photography paying attention? Sure we use urinals every day but have we really stopped to consider how they look?

Washington, DC, November 1972

I may embrace their mechanical nature but that's not what I love best about Shore's toilet photos. I cherish their filth. These aren't sanitized photos and that wasn't a sanitized world. Not only would it be hard to find such photographs on a gallery wall today, it would be hard to find these toilets in real life, at least in the Western world. In an increasingly clean, bright culture --an increasingly "mediated culture" to use Shore's phrase-- these seem a tonic, a reminder of a world with rough edges. Maybe I'm biased. After all my family toilet growing up was a piece of wood mounted over an open pit. But I like to think that world can appeal also to a broader demographic.

I know this world still exists out there somewhere, maybe in "undeveloped" countries. Or in some forgotten corners of the US. But it doesn't appear very often in the fine art photo world. Contemporary curations such as this one or this one exemplify the state of affairs, collectively depicting a world almost completely devoid of grime. To me they seem as filtered as sitcoms. 

Perhaps it's time to reconsider American Surfaces. Instead of being dismissed as a dead-end precursor to Shore's important work, I think these pictures of filthy crapholes were in fact ahead of their time. Hopefully they can assume their rightful place on art photography's throne
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Beach Motel

New Mexico, 1972, Lee Friedlander

New Topographics #125 Untitled, 1973, John Schott

Found postcard, Unknown Date

(Thanks to Wayne Bremser for research assistance.)

I'm moving to LA

It's official. I'm moving to LA. Everything's falling into place. I bought my plane ticket today. I found some RayBans at Goodwill. Now it's just a matter of tying up a few loose ends and then packing.

My new digs just minutes from downtown! Have your people call my people.

The current plan is to move to Los Angeles November 15th. After a few days exploring the city I will move back to Eugene on November 18th.

I want to thank all the people in Eugene who've helped make my time here so special. I've made some great connections and some lifelong friends. But sometimes you just have to take that plunge into the unknown. I've reached a point in my life where I need to spread my wings, even if it's just for an extended weekend away. I know my Eugene friendships are strong enough to endure though we may be separated by thousands of miles.

While in LA I'll be staying in a budget hotel near downtown with fellow Oregon photographer Bruce Hall. We plan to spend most of our time shooting, with occasional breaks for meals and sleep, and maybe a few gallery visits. Any local photographers who want to join us for a beer or meal, or if you have special LA tips, please get in touch.

Watch out LaLa Land, here we come....

Pop Quiz

I recently bumped into someone I hadn't seen in a while. "Any shows coming up?" she asked. God how I hate that question. I know it's not intended to be rude. It's just making conversation. But I don't think it's very important. "Any shows coming up?" You might as well ask "What did you eat for breakfast?" or "Write any good blog posts lately?" In regard to making photographs it's equally irrelevant.

Of course the question has a subtext. "Any shows coming up?" really means "How's the photo career going?" Because exhibitions are generally regarded as a measure of progress, especially to people viewing photography from the outside. It's something they can fix in their mind and get hold of. And I suppose it is relevant to making a career in photography. But it has very little to do with actually being a photographer. Making images and scheduling images for a wall are two very different activities.

So what should you ask a photographer when you bump into them? I don't think I've ever asked another photographer about their exhibition schedule. Instead I usually start a conversation with, "Have you made any interesting photos lately?" or some variation of that. Then we can get someplace. But of course that's just a suggestion. You could ask about their musical taste or recent psychic explorations or their kids or whatever. Photographers tend to be interesting people, although some of us aren't chatty.

Where will this shadow be in one hour?

Sometimes you'll need to weed out the real photographers from the riffraff. In those cases it's helpful to ask more pointed questions. Any street or found scene photographer worth his salt should be able to reply immediately to these:

1. Point north.
2. Describe 10 people you saw the last time you were downtown.
3. In the northern hemisphere a tree's shadow falls away from you. After an hour, which direction did it move?
4. When a preoccupied person notices you approaching, they might look up. Where do they typically look next?
5. What's the weather forecast for the next 5 days?
6. How long does it typically take you to walk a mile (to nearest minute)?
7. What's your remaining shot capacity today (either on film or memory card)?
8. What time will the sun set tonight (to within 5 minutes)?
9. What did you do wrong on the last shot?
10. What did you eat for breakfast?

Again these are just suggestions. Invent your own. Talk them over. Just please don't ask about fucking shows coming up.

Pelle Cass: What Was He Thinking?

Pelle Cass is a photographer based in Brookline, MA. An exhibition of his Strangers series will be shown at Gallery Kayafas in Boston, October 19 - November 24, 2012, with reception and talk on October 25, 6-8 pm. 

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A lot of my projects start with irritation. In this case, I was annoyed at portraiture itself, if that's possible. Things I was tired of: psychological acuity, expressions of personality, big deadpan faces (although I was also fascinated), identity. I thought it would be funny to eliminate psychology and personality (the people in my pictures are barely recognizable as themselves), and focus only on skin. I did want the pictures to be expressive, but in a new way, if possible. All these pictures were done by taking many close ups, and blending the fragments together to make a new face, distortions of anatomy, scale, focus, and perspective preserved.

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APC

This is the first one I did in 2008. It was the result of simple curiosity. It's also of me, although I've shown it to many people who did not notice until I pointed it out. Maybe they were being polite about my hideousness. I put my little point and shoot camera on a tripod and swiveled the screen around so I could focus and compose. I'd seen David Hockney's photocollages, of course, and was interested in the idea that multiple exposures could mean more and deeper looking. But I didn't want to repeat Hockney, and I preferred a photograph to look like a photograph from a single point of view. This picture sat around for a couple of years before I continued the series. 

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IR

I was lucky enough to go to Yaddo in 2010, an artist's residency in Saratoga Springs, NY. An incredible place. I got more ideas and images in a month there than in two years at home. I decided to ask the other residents--writers, artists, and composers--to pose. (I don't identify the people except by their initials because cluing the viewer into their identity is contrary to the spirit of the project. Also, the pictures make these fantastic people look ugly, which they emphatically were not.) I was a little nervous with I____. I knew I'd have to lean over and stick my camera a few inches from his face. It was January and around 20 degrees. The it was cloudy and the light was diffuse and weak. I took about a hundred pictures. It went fine, but I was nervous when I showed the more or less finished picture to him. It's pretty forceful, like an ugly Easter Island oracle. He didn't seem to mind, but I still felt a little guilty. 

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PC

This is another Yaddo resident who was generous enough to sit for me. I brought a stool out so P___ could sit in front of a construction trailer--you can see the blue of it's signage in the background. P___ is very mild in appearance and friendly in demeanor, contrary to the picture you see. The sitting took about twenty minutes. When putting the fragments back together, I generally look for the most intense frames (just like a regular photographer!), and hope that when they're all put together, the intensity will be multiplied. 

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CJ

C___ is an extraordinarily pretty woman, so I was especially nervous about making her into a Stranger. This is still at Yaddo--and C____'s skin turned pink with the cold. I had tried and failed once before to do a picture of her (I screwed up the lighting and made shadows on her face with my head and camera because I was so close). I also knew she was in a rush. This was just after breakfast before the work day would begin. She seemed very forbearing about the results. I found it odd that she came out looking so symmetrical, something like the head on an ancient Greek or Roman coin. 

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MB

I was perhaps friendliest with M______ of all the people at Yaddo since we shared a studio building. So I was relatively relaxed. Cold seems to be a feature of many of these pictures, but it was the intense, refreshing kind you get when the air is still--something you never get in windy Boston where I live. 

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FM

I was looking forward to taking pictures of F_____. She was very funny and seemed not to be vain, attractive as she is. She turned out to be a bit of a ham, and I also did a little gif animation of her making funny faces. One striking thing is that the sun kept coming out from behind the clouds. I thought it was a disaster as I was photographing. But when I put the picture together, I really liked it. You can see the sun hitting her eyes, but the rest of her face was photographed in cloudy light. 

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MH

M____ is someone in my circle in Boston, and this picture was done in Summer 2012 (the Yaddo pictures are from 2010). I had avoided taking her picture because I knew her to be careful about her appearance and, of course, I knew I would make her look grotesque. Again, I seem to have underestimated my sitter, who seem to understand that the pictures are not about them. They are about expression--expression of exactly what, I'm not sure. But in this case, M___ appears to be blinking. And what is striking to me is that she appears angry on the left half of her face and sad on the right. 

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MH2

This is the same person, M___ , as in the previous picture. I think it might be the ugliest of the series, but somehow is the most emotional. It's kind of striking that I started out doing a kind of bloodless experiment--removing the variable of identity--and ended up producing rather forceful pictures.