I had never met Stephen Shore before. I’m a big fan of his, especially his photos of The Factory in the 1960s and ‘70s, and the series Uncommon Places. I saw him twice last April to discuss his retrospective at the Rencontres d’Arles, one of the highlights of this year’s festival. The first time was at his home on New York’s Upper East Side. The second was at his printer’s, Philippe Laumont. I had prepared dozens of questions about The Factory, Warhol, Malanga, Morrissey and his switch to color, but that didn’t last 15 seconds. He wasn’t interested in any of that. Not at all. “I’m only interested in new things,” he said. What I already know bores me. If there’s not a challenge, I leave.”
Seeing that I had gotten off to a bad start, I timidly asked a somewhat simplistic question: “What about photography today is of interest for you?” “Instagram,” he said. I thought I was dreaming. Here was one of the masters of American color photography and he only wanted to talk about Instagram: all his friends on Instagram with whom he is in constant contact, his classes at Bard College (where he uses Instagram all the time), his upcoming conference at Photo London where he would be discussing Instagram. I’m a dinosaur, but I listened…
Towards the end, he discussed his work on Israel, an astonishing adventure organized by Frédéric Brenner featuring contributions from Wendy Ewald, Martin Kollar, Josef Koudelka, Jungjin Lee, Gilles Peress, Fazal Sheikh, Stephen Shore, Rosalind Fox Solomon, Thomas Struth, Jeff Wall and Nick Waplington. An exhibition currently on display in Tel Aviv that will travel to the Brooklyn Museum in February 2016. Incredibly, this exhibition has yet to find an exhibition space in Western Europe.
During our second interview, he accepted to talk about his 5 favorites pictures on video, we will present them this week.
EXHIBITION
In part of Les Rencontres d’Arles
From July 6th to September 20th, 2015
Stephen Shore
Exhibition organised by the Fundacion MAPFRE in collaboration with les Rencontres d’Arles
Espace Van Gogh
35 Ter Rue du Dr Fanton
13200 Arles
France
http://www.stephenshore.net
http://www.rencontres-arles.com
EVENT
Conference and booksigning with Stephen Shore, introduced by Natasha Wolinski
On July 7th, 2015 at 10am
Cours de Fanton
34 rue du Docteur Fanton
13200 Arles
France
BOOKS
Stephen Shore
Editions Xavier Barral
Release in 2014
300 x 240 mm
320 pages
200 photographs
ISBN : 978-2-36511-064-8
http://exb.fr
Stephen Shore
Survivors in Ukraine
Editions Phaidon
Release in October 1st, 2015
214 x 290 mm
175 color photographs
59,95€
http://www.phaidon.com
