PDN - August 2011

real Talk: PhoTograPhy acroSS generaTionS

heroes & Mentors

Left: “Untitled,” from “Beneath the Roses,” 2005, by Gregory Crewdson.

Crewdson: That’s part of the con-
dition of making art in a certain sense.
You absorb traditions and attempt
to reinvent and make them your own
and then the next generation does the
same.
shore: Have you ever read The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions by
Thomas Kuhn?

Crewdson: No. shore: A very interesting book. He’s the person who really popularized the word “paradigm.” Talking about science, he said for something to be a paradigm it has to have two qualities: It has to be sufficiently unprecedented and sufficiently open ended so that people can continue the exploration. If it’s not open ended it’s not a paradigm. And in terms of photography, someone could take a picture based on one of mine and it’s not a copy of mine because one is my vision and the other is their vision.

Shore: I saw myself as an explorer. I was thinking about the structural problems in the photograph, [about] photography as a technical means of communicating what the world looks like if you see it in a state of heightened awareness.

of Modern Art], at the time of his big retrospective in the early Seventies. He talked about his photographs being transcendent documents. I took that to mean that he understood that the pictures existed on a level that had deep psychological resonances that were not simply a matter of cultural reference, as well as a level of cultural reference.

I didn’t think about beauty a lot. During “American Surfaces” I was photographing every meal I ate and what art on walls looked like. I saw myself as an explorer. I was thinking about the structural problems in the photograph, [about] photography as a technical means of communicating what the world looks like if you see it in a state of heightened awareness. The subject matter that interested me for various other reasons was the perfect subject matter for this exploration, because if the subject matter is too highly charged, a viewer can become involved in those aspects of the picture and be less open to the subtler aspects of it.

I look at Robert Frank I bristle at it. I have the highest respect for his work, but in terms of that aspect of my personality it just seems so pointed. Sometimes people compare my work to his because we both traveled around America, but at the time I was seeing what I was doing as almost anti-Frank. That’s another way of saying that what I’ve chosen to do and the coolness of it is an expression of my personality.

Crewdson: Both of us are very in-
vested in the role of being a teacher.
Why is being a teacher important to
you and how do you see it in relation to
your role as an artist?
shore: Those are separate but con-
nected things. In terms of my art, as I
have a new idea I can put it out in the teaching and it
becomes a testing ground for an idea or perception. But
I see teaching as a separate activity where—this may be
too much mystical thinking—for a person to progress
in their own evolution it’s necessary for them to bring
other people to the place they were. I feel that I have a
duty to do it.

Crewdson: Do you see the images as invested with
any kind of personal narrative or an aspect of your own
psychology?

shore: I think it’s inevitable. Even in trying to rid the picture of it, it inevitably expresses it. This goes back to my kinship to Evans and having kind of a classical temperament. There was something in me that, when

Crewdson: Your body of work “Uncommon Places” has become iconic. How does it feel now to see those pictures being so influential, not only to younger artists, but you see the references in movies and throughout our culture?

shore: It’s hard for me to answer. I see what you are saying and it makes me feel good. On the other hand, I know that in Europe some curators are making a big thing that I influenced the [Bernd and Hilla] Becher students and some of the Becher students are uncomfortable with this. I don’t understand that because it doesn’t take away from their achievement that they have been influenced any more than it takes away from what I’ve done to talk about looking at Evans and Ed Ruscha and postcards—we all have influences. How can you be an intelligent artist in our culture and not have influences and not work on a basis of things you’ve seen?

Crewdson: I feel that same obligation. I always
find that it’s important to have that connection to the
next generation of artists that are coming up. It keeps
you vital in a certain way.

shore: My goal as a teacher is to help [my students] find their own voice, so if I have ten people in class it means I have to think like ten different people and that has proven to be an interesting mental exercise because then when I go out to take pictures, it’s like I’ve been flexing my esthetic faculty and I simply see more potential or see more opportunities, and wind up taking pictures that don’t look like my pictures. This whole process, this whole endeavor of teaching has pushed my own boundaries.