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When I arrived in San Francisco in January 1975, my Ford Maverick filled with boxes containing what my twenty-four-year-old self considered valuable, I had fairly typical aspirations for a photographer entering graduate school: I wanted to make photographs, get them shown, and find a teaching position after graduation. What I didn’t anticipate was becoming an art critic or making the images that would come to define my work.
Artists should try to speak about these things, because who else could do so? I’m not here to simply criticize what’s happening or formally denounce an issue. I’d like it to be suggested, so that those who see my work perceive this division and it becomes food for thought.
To invoke the initial premise of making photographs that were like how people talked, if a snapshot captured a comment or quick remark, a larger format could contain the detail and nuance of a conversation. ‘I really was going to do American Surfaces with a larger format’, Shore recalls. ‘And then, I found that the larger format led me to discover other things about photographic seeing that I wanted to explore.'