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 | | The Nature of Photographs by Stephen Shore ISBN-10: 9780714845852 ISBN-10: 0-7148-4585-X ISBN-13: 9780714845852 ISBN-13: 978-0-7148-4585-2 Hardcover 2007-02-01 Phaidon Press Find Lowest Price |
Editorials | ||
Product Description This book grew out of a college course that Stephen Shore taught for many years. Its aim is not to explore photographic content - the subject of an image - but to describe the physical and formal attributes of a photographic print, the very elements that form the tools a photographer uses to define and interpret that content. By teaching us how to look at photographs and helping us to see the world the way the photographer may have seen it, Shore also teaches us a way of looking at the world around us. "The Nature of Photographs" is a primary tool for critical analysis and the understanding of photography in general. As one of the photographers who established colour photography as a legitimate medium of artistic expression in the early 1970s and an influential and important teacher of both the theory and practice of photography, Stephen Shore is the ideal guide to the subject of 'how' to look at photographs. By putting himself in the shoes of the photographers, he imagines the concerns or approach to the subject or concept they may have had when they were taking the picture. As well as a selection of Shore's own work, "The Nature of Photographs" contains images from all eras of photography, from classic images by Walker Evans, Brassai and Eugene Atget to more contemporary work by Bernd and Hilla Becher, Cindy Sherman, Joel Sternfeld, Thomas Struth, Richard Prince and Andreas Gursky. It includes all genres, such as street photography, fine art photography and documentary photography, as well as images by unknown photographers, be they in the form of a snapshot from the early days of photography or an aerial photograph taken as part of a geographical survey. Shore has selected images by, among others, Eugene Atget, Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, William Eggleston and Robert Adams, and offers an explanation as to how they 'work'. Together with his clear, intelligent and accessible text, Shore uses these works to demonstrate how the world in front of the camera is transformed into a photograph. | ||
Reviews | ||
Great Book, Good learning opportunities This book is great learning material for photographers. It's a little "heady", but full of beautiful, inspiring images. | ||
Science Oriented This is an interesting book in that it explains the visual mechanics behind how we view photographs. Many of the examples given are beautiful pictures in their own right, but it is the written explanations of what goes on on in our brains as we study these two dimensional flat objects, where the book really shines. Despite its rather small size it is quite fascinating: an easy read, yet very informative. Any student of either science or photography, as well as those merely curious about how things work, will enjoy Shore's marvelous oeuvre. My only reservation, prompting the four star rating rather than a five, is its briefness. When it comes to us photographers, the more pictures, the better. | ||
Short but deep In this short essay, Shore manages to communicate some deep truths about photography in a refreshingly clear and accessible style. The arguments are simple, profound and convincing. Together with the photographs, the result is a thought-provoking and almost meditative book. It has become one of my favorites. | ||
You can look but can you see I've always loved Stephen Shore's work ever since I bought his 'Uncommon Places' book in 1983. It has two of my favorite Shore images: La Brea Avenue & Beverley Boulevard and El Paso Street, El Paso (both taken in 1975) this last one is in The Nature of Photography. A photographer is perhaps the ideal person to tell others about the fundamentals of looking at photos and my appreciation of Shore's work was enough to make me buy the book. It certainly has some quite stunning photos, especially where they relate to specific text and many thought provoking points come across but I was left with the impression that there should have been more or a different way to explain what there is. The book's photos are a key element in how to understand what is going on and I would have preferred to have seen others that didn't work as obviously as the ones that do. Shore, like any creative photographer, must have taken many images that he doesn't think work as well as the final choice. Seeing some lesser alternatives to the ones in the book would have improved it no end by explaining why photo A reveals a fundamental point beautifully but photo B doesn't. I thought too many visual concepts were put across more by words than images. Shore says that he used Szarkowski's `The Photographer's Eye' when he started teaching and his book carries on the theme. Overall I still prefer Szarkowski's book, there are far more photos included and the presentation is much more user friendly than the hard edge Phaidon design, with its excessive amounts of empty page space and trendy use of a typewriter font for every bit of text. Incidentally as both books are concerned with image appreciation and understanding maybe a DVD format would work just as well as these printed versions. ***FOR AN INSIDE LOOK click 'customer images' under the cover. | ||
Did i get the same book? I read the reviews. I got the book. I read the book. Then I went and reread through the reviews again to see if I had missed the point of what people must have been saying. I'm left wondering if I even have the same book. First off, this book has great photos magnificently reproduced. I appreciate when an author lets the images speak for themselves and this book had great potential to do just that, seeing that the entire text of the book would scarcely fill a dozen or so 3x5 file cards. Then the author opened his mouth and I was no longer sure what I was looking at. Only about 10% of the text made any sense to me. I do not question his mastery of photography, but I got the feeling I was being talked down to because I didn't have a doctorate in philosophy. I will agree with one reviewer statement that it seemed a bit pretentious. He really needs to work on his communication skills. Education should be used to help others learn, not show off how educated you are. Personally, I didn't get a lot out of it. Not just because there wasn't a lot in it, but because what little there was seemed to go right over my head. I was left with the possible conclusion that maybe I'm too dumb to be a photographer. A good book should make seemingly complex topics simple, not do what this book does and make the very simple act of looking at a photograph complex. | ||