How does a photograph "work"? In this book, internationally acclaimed photographer Stephen Shore brings together more than 50 images (by such photographers as Walker Evans, Eugene Atget, Robert Adams, Diane Arbus, Frank Gohlke, Lee Friedlander and Jan Groover) to illustrate a process of looking at and understanding photography. He traces the process by which the world in front of the camera is transformed into a photograph - and how that photograph, in turn, is transformed into a mental image. A photograph, Shore explains, can be viewed on several levels. First, it is a physical object, a print. On this print is an image, an illusion of a window onto the world. It is at this level that we "read" a picture and discover its content: a souvenir of an exotic land, the face of a lover, a wet rock, a landscape at night. This is the depictive level, in which the world is transformed into a photograph through qualities of flatness, frame, time and focus. On a final level is the mental apprehension of the image, which joins the focus of lens, eye, attention and mind.
Using these levels of seeing, Shore reveals how the qualities of a photograph create tension and meaning - as the collapsing of depth creates new relationships; as lines and shapes in the image play against the frame; as focus creates barriers in the depth of an image; as the duration of exposure variously transforms the fluid world in to a static piece of film.
- ISBN10 0801857198
- ISBN13 9780801857195
- Publish Date 25 February 1998 (first published 17 February 1998)
- Publish Status Out of Stock
- Out of Print 18 January 2011
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Johns Hopkins University Press
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 104
- Language English