Art and the Rapier Word

8 March 2020

On Saturday, the Washington Post ran a story on legendary photographer Stephen Shore.  The paper was who deemed him legendary, not me. I reserved judgment because I really don’t know if he is legendary. According to the paper he had previously published a couple of volumes that were impliedly masterpieces and seminal. 

Apparently in the 1970s when he was generating his seminal works, he used a large format camera.  Concurrent with those photos he was also capturing images with a 35mm camera.  A book has recently published containing some of these prints from the 35mm.

The reviewer in the Post gushed about what these photos represented.  Seemed a bit hyperbolic, but hey most critics are earnest dispensers of hyperbole. I looked at the three or four samples found in the article and I liked them.  If a show of these images were to come to my local art museum, I would go see them.

To me the pictures were images of a vanished world. In bright colors the photographer had captured an America of small businesses and the people who used them.  Liquor stores with moving neon signs, the ones where at night the neon bottle tips over and fills a martini glass, were present.  Also present were a couple standing across from a local eatery with an enameled sign advertising its existence and the food it sold. These were images of the realities of the 1970s and 1980s.  Much of that world is gone, just empty store fronts now.

Had I not skipped to the comments section I would have moved on without another thought on the article. But I did read the comments and good golly gosh were they just something. Kitty Wumpus seems to have gotten the ball rolling with the following, “Applaud and worship these all you want, but none of them rise above poorly composed, poorly photographed ordinary subjects that really carry no meaning to the rest of the world. Back to trying to identify the automobiles, a far more worthy project than looking at the rest of the photo.” Yeah, that is what got said. 

Thereafter came an engaged and engaging discussion of the appropriateness of calling photography an art form. Notes were posted about the commenter’s approach to criticism. Others debated about the real artistic value of these images. It was a dogfight plain and simple. I could not figure out for the life of me why the writers seemed to have some much invested in an art critic’s almost hagiographic note.  

Social media has screwed us up.  We in our anonymity have lost our civility.  There seems to be almost a gleeful joy, the kind a miscreant kid would get from throwing a rock at another person while well hidden behind a large leafy bush. Knowing that no retributive personal pain will result from such an antisocial and nasty action these folks just hurl their barbs.  We collectively are inflicting pain for our individual pleasure.  I don’t know how we get beyond this.

If the coronavirus doesn’t get me the evil in human hearts will.

[Note well, the photo above is not one from the photographer in question.  This image was used to simply illustrate a photograph of the mundane that was visually interesting.]