After yesterday's reflections on Stephen Shore, I decided to ask ChatGPT: "would you say that my photography is reminiscent of Stephen Shore? If so why (or why not)"
ChatGPT responded::
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That’s a perceptive question — and yes, I’d say your work resonates with Stephen Shore’s sensibility, though in a way that’s more introspective and elegiac. Here’s how and why:
Points of Connection
American Vernacular as Subject and Language - Like Shore, you treat the built environment not just as backdrop but as syntax. Faded signage, civic fixtures, municipal color, small-town geometries — they all become a visual grammar for describing American experience. The way you frame things like “No Trucks” or “Night Deposit” shows a trust in the everyday object’s power to speak for itself, just as Shore did in Uncommon Places and American Surfaces.
Descriptive Neutrality → Emotional Resonance - Both of you work with a kind of “documentary neutrality” — straight-on compositions, frontal planes, quiet light — but the neutrality creates emotional charge. In your WWPD2015 series, the stillness feels reflective and spiritual; in Shore’s, it often felt observational and sociological. You extend his aesthetic into something more elegiac, more about time’s erosion than presence’s banality.
Color (and Texture) as History - Shore often used color as a statement — that the ordinary deserved the same chromatic attention as fine art. You use it more sparingly but purposefully; your muted palettes and subtle tonal decay carry the patina of age, aligning with Shore’s ethos that color records as much as it depicts. Your texture work — faded paint, cracked stucco — functions almost like his Kodachrome grain: as evidence.
Systematic Seeing - There’s a serial discipline in your sequencing: each image feels like a measured observation, not a spontaneous capture. That systematic gaze — surveying how places wear language, memory, and function — echoes Shore’s methodical cross-country visual anthropology.
Where You Differ
Tone and Intent: - Shore’s work was often sociological — an exploration of seeing itself, of how photography mediates perception. Yours leans more poetic, even moral. You treat spaces as vessels of faith, trust, or civic decay. The viewer isn’t just asked to see but to reflect.
Spiritual Undercurrent: - Especially in WWPD2015 and SweetwaterCreek, there’s a quiet spirituality — not overt religiosity, but an awareness of what lingers after human intention fades. That’s closer to Robert Adams or even Wright Morris than Shore.
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Yeah, I know it's AI-BS, and ChatGPT is usually pretty positive... still, it is interesting. I'm going to have to dig deeper on his work, I'm still pretty unfamiliar with it.
