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A review of The Nature of Photographs by Stephen Shore.

ISBN 0-8018-5720-1 1998 John Hopkins University Press.

I picked this book up and, unusually for me, started at the beginning. I read: “The more the medium of photography has been the irrefutable messenger of its own aesthetic core, the more that photographers, writers, and critics throughout history have been inspired to refine the descriptive elements of its attributes.” I put it down again.

Several months later I realised that I had started reading the foreword from some academic wallah and that I had nearly missed reading a book that was, in fact, startling in its clarity and brevity.

I had bought the book essentially because it was scarce and I had come across a copy with two zeros fewer in its price than some that I had seen advertised. I had been researching Stephen Shore as a photographer for a new idea for a series of web pages. During the research I came across references to this, out of print, book of his writing and found advertised prices in excess of a thousand US dollars.

The book contains an attempt to describe “the nature of photographs”. This is done in four sections and is extremely well illustrated with photographs from a wide range of photographers. By “illustrated” I mean that the photos are used to amplify and explain the text, not merely to be a decorative adjunct to it.

Section one contains the mundane (photos are generally light sensitive emulsion on paper…) and merely serves duty clearing away these descriptive element from the later sections.

Section two deals with “the ways in which the world in front of the camera is transformed into the photograph: flatness, frame, time and focus”. This is a discussion about the decisions that a photographer makes from the pen of a very experienced photographer. No ‘rule of thirds’ here but a very pithy exposition of these simple concepts and how they influence the resulting pictures.

Section three deals with the possible differences between the recorded image and the perception of a viewer of that image and how photographers can influence this perception by the choices they make.

Section four, slightly less successfully, deals with how Stephen Shore builds an image using his understanding of the interaction of reality, perception, and the four formal elements from section two.

It took me less than an hour to read the entire book (foreword excepted) yet it provided me with a set of analytical tools for describing and understanding my own photographs that I will use for a long time.

Recommended. Although for the prices that people are asking (between £150 and £300 on a quick search at the time of typing this) it would be worth finding it in a library. Alternatively keep trying with the online booksellers and you might get lucky as I did.

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