Here’s an interesting video of Stephen Shore giving a talk at the Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture in London in October, 2010.
The website would not allow me to embed the video, so you'll have to click on the image to go to the video. Sorry.
I wanted to simply embed the video, but the school apparently doesn’t like to share its free videos. So, you have to click on the frame shot at the left or else here. The quality of the audio and video leave a bit to be desired, but it’s not unwatchable.
According to the description on the web site: “Stephen Shore will discuss the ways in which a three-dimensional world flowing in time is transformed into a photograph, and how cultural forces are made visible and therefore accessible to photography through architecture.”
The video draws heavily on Shore’s book, The Nature of Photographs, which is one of the most concise and excellent explorations of photography I’ve found.
Two Languages: Words and Pictures
“Many people approach the act of looking at photographs with an inherent blind spot. They need to know what it is before they can appreciate how it looks.”
Pure Seeing. No Caption Needed. Photo copyright Emmet Gowin. "Nancy, Danville, Virginia, 1969"
For me this statement, and the essay it is from, would alone have made reading Philip Gefter’s “Photography After Frank” worthwhile. It  is just one of many gems in Mr. Gefter’s series of essays exploring photographers and photography in the 50 years since the publication of Robert Frank’s “The Americans.”
To put the observation into context, the particular essay quoted is entitled: “Reading Newspaper Pictures: A Thousand Words, and Then Some.” Gefter recalls how, as picture editor for the New York Times, he observed his word-oriented colleagues come to photography as though it were a foreign language. They could not evaluate, or even really see, a picture without words that accompanied and explained the image. Continue reading →
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