![\"\u00a9](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.foto8.com\/live\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/08\/shore_jul_06_1973.jpg?resize=470%2C301&ssl=1\" "\\"\u00a9")
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Journal – July 06, 1973 \u00a9 Stephen Shore <\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n On July 4th 1973, after finishing the pancakes he had ordered for breakfast, Stephen Shore used his Amex card (number 029 473 953 7501AX) to pay the bill ($30.48) for his night\u2019s stay at the Holiday Inn Town in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He took five photographs in town before driving west to Blue Mountain \u2013 in time for a shrimp creole lunch at the local Howard Johnson\u2019s. On he drove, reaching Greensburg by nightfall. After a plate of spaghetti at the Eat In Park he spent the night at the Executive Motor Lodge, watching NBC\u2019s Dragnet spin-off Adam-12 before retiring. \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Journal – July 16, 1973 \u00a9 Stephen Shore <\/span><\/p>\n As Shore explains, \u201cOn this trip in \u201973 I kept a log of various facts \u2013 essentially what I wanted to do was to keep a kind of journal that was not a personal diary. It wasn\u2019t a record of my impressions, but it described a trip in more neutral terms. And so I reported how many miles I drove, where and what I ate, where I stayed, what I watched on television, or, when I went to the movies, what I saw. Then I also made a collection of all the printed matter that came my way \u2013 receipts, hotel stationery, postcards, occasional clippings from newspapers, parking tickets and so on. And when I got back from the trip I pasted this all into a book, which is now being reproduced in facsimile, full size.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThat\u2019s the first part – there are essentially two parts to it. Also, every day I made a written record of all the photographs I took with my medium format camera \u2013 and the second main part of the journal is the reproduction, in chronological order, of every one of those pictures from that trip. Every single one, including the occasional double exposure. The photos are the supplementary back matter to the journal\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Bay Movie House, Second Street, Ashland, Wisconsin, July 9, 1973 \u00a9 Stephen Shore<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n In its impassive acknowledgement of the routines of everyday consumption, the Journal bears comparison with the work of one of Shore\u2019s former associates, Andy Warhol.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Shore concurs: \u201cGenerally speaking, at around that time there were three people whose work, in a combined way, influenced me \u2013 Walker Evans, Ed Ruscha (by his books), and Andy Warhol. With Warhol, there were a number of things of importance. I\u2019d spent three years at The Factory and it had been the first time I\u2019d seen an artist at work. He displayed a fascination with contemporary culture and I admired his use of surreal imagery. And yes, with regard to my own attempts to record every detail about something, bear in mind that I was at The Factory when Warhol wrote the novel “a” which was his attempt to try and record everything that happened to someone in the course of a day.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Despite the industry of his diary-keeping, the Journal discloses no intimacies of its author\u2019s personal life. As is the case with the work of Evans, Ruscha and Warhol, the book is determinedly sceptical about photography\u2019s capacity to convey emotional content or self-expression. In this regard, Shore cites another forbear:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI felt that the main influence on me during those years was that of Walker Evans – not just because we were both trying to look at America through a view camera, but also because I had always felt that temperamentally we were similar. We both employed a more formal, classic approach to taking pictures and it\u2019s a way of working that is wary, or suspicious, of photography that tries to manipulate the emotions of the viewer.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cFor example, if you look at the work of Robert Frank I think you can see that it is more directed \u2013 it has a more obvious point of view. But I saw culture in a more complex way than taking a particular point of view towards it would allow. In other words, my point of view was the complexity of the phenomenon.\u201d \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Journal – July 18, 1973 \u00a9 Stephen Shore<\/span><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Part that complexity was that America \u2013 unlike most art photography of the time – existed in colour. \u201cI didn\u2019t understand the prohibition against colour. I was looking at postcards, snapshots, TV, movies, magazines \u2013 all of which were in colour. However there was this hold-out in the world of art photography against it. But a significant part of the information you can relay about a society is its palette.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n In its embrace of colour and in its conceptual underpinnings the Road Trip Journal stands as the most complete, and the most engrossing, expression of Shore\u2019s work from the 1970\u2019s. By dint of the accumulation and repetition of detail, an assiduously-composed picture emerges of a journey and a country. But not, of course, of a photographer.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n \u00a9 Guy Lane, 2008.<\/em><\/p>\n A Road Trip Journal<\/p>\n Images and Texts by Stephen Shore<\/p>\n Published by Phaidon Press (forthcoming) Hardback with slipcase<\/p>\n ISBN: 978 0 7148 4801 3<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n An edited version of this interview first published in <\/em>Art World magazine. <\/em><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Though Stephen Shore\u2019s earliest black and white photographs were favourably received, his reputation was built on two bodies of work in colour – American Surfaces<\/em> and Uncommon Places<\/em> – assembled from pictures taken during a series of 1970s road trips across the United States.<\/p>\n An extraordinary third project from the era – Road Trip Journal<\/em> – has languished largely unseen, until now. Like its predecessors, the Journal <\/em>attests to Shore\u2019s fascination with the banalities of popular culture and the idiosyncrasies of the vernacular. <\/p>\n Stephen Shore spoke to Guy Lane about his work, and desire to produce a distinctly impersonal diary. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":929,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nHow do we know? We know because Shore\u2019s own scarily-detailed Road Trip Journal tells us so. Compiled in 1973 and published now for the first time, the Journal is an extraordinary hybrid: part timetable \/ part Conceptual Art \/ part food diary \/ part photo album. <\/span><\/div>\n![\"\u00a9](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.foto8.com\/live\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/08\/shore_jul_16_1973.jpg?resize=470%2C311&ssl=1\" "\\"\u00a9")
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Price \u00a3125.00\/ \u20ac175.00<\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"\u00a9](\"https:\/\/www.foto8.com\/live\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/08\/shore_intro.jpg\" "\\"\u00a9")
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