Stephen Shore's Non-Peak Moments

It is exactly one week after the election of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States of America. And from his New York home, Stephen Shore is looking down his computer at me, via the Skype feed that links us, deliberating over the words to express his reaction to the news. “This is going to be a very slow recovery, I think. All over the world it’s been a shock.” The sprightly, silver-haired Shore, who turns 70 this year, pauses for a moment and then neatly diverts the political headline to a subject still relevant to the discussion but of greater concern to him personally.

- Keith Wilson

“I do Instagram very actively. I have a lot of followers in Iran,” says Stephen Shore. “In fact, the book on photography I wrote called The Nature of Photographs, a bootleg translation in Farsi, has been published in Tehran and has been used in schools there. One of the people Donald Trump is considering for Secretary of State is a person whose policy position is to preemptively bomb Iran. This is unbelievable!”

This observation of a potential area of conflict that remains no more than a peripheral concern to others is consistent with Shore’s way of seeing the world. During our conversation, he uses several phrases to describe his perspective. This is a man led by his “contrarian nature” and attracted to the “non-peak moments” of life; a photographer who sees the world “with a heightened awareness”, whether it’s on the ground glass of 8 x 10, or through the nose of a plastic Mick-a-Matic.

By the time Shore was 14, he thought of nothing else but photography: “Oh yeah. I was very serious about it,” he says. Then, his eyes widen and the brow rises, as a distant memory pushes to the forefront of interest. “Something I just remembered when talking to someone last week, by the time I was probably 11… do you know what developing by inspection is?”