Credit Eric Oglander
By Jonathan Blaustein Mar. 15, 2016 Mar. 15, 2016 1
Andy Warhol once predicted that in the future, everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. In the 21st century, with its endless and absurd string of viral phenomena, his words seem more prescient than ever. Stephen Shore, who got his start as a teenager photographing at Warhol’s Factory, says he thinks Warhol would approve of platforms like Instagram, which can make anonymous photographers famous, courtesy of the proper hashtag.
“I think generally he was fascinated by contemporary culture, in whatever form it took,” Mr. Shore said in a recent interview.
“I can’t help but think he would be fascinated with this.”
Mr. Shore is highly invested in Instagram, having lectured about it at the Photo London festival in 2015, and judged an audience participation competition for the social media platform, too. Surprisingly, he is in a career phase where his Instagram feed is the main photographic outlet.
“To be honest,” he said, “this is my primary work now.”
Photo
Stephen Shore, @stephen.shore.
He shoots regularly, using Instagram like a sketchbook, posting one picture daily, always something made within the past week. (Except for the occasional #ThrowbackThursday.)
Images from his Instagram feed, alongside other artsy Instagrammers, including the theorists David Campany and Marvin Heiferman, have recently been published in a new project called Documentum: Volume No. 1, Issue No. 1, a quarterly periodical published by Fall Line Press in Atlanta. The venture was founded last year by Mr. Shore, his friend William Boling, the publisher of the press, and Dawn Kim, whom they found while searching Instagram. A companion exhibition was recently on display at Poem 88, an Atlanta art gallery, for which prints were made from the Instagram photos. (“They sold like hotcakes,” Mr. Boling said.)
Both Mr. Shore and Mr. Boling, another longtime color photographer, were attracted to the platform’s spontaneity — and the fact that it’s fun. They were also enamored of its social aspects, as neither had become attached to Facebook or Twitter. Both artists reported meeting people in the real world with whom they had corresponded only via Instagram, and feeling as if they already knew the person. It allowed them to build community, and stay connected, two hallmarks of the social media revolution.
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The cover of Documentum: Volume No. 1, Issue No. 1.
That connection between the digital and the real drove Documentum to summon pictures out of the digital sphere and into the physical world. “They were created digitally,” Mr. Boling said, “to exist in a digital world. They’re the ultimate virtual reality image. Here we are, digging them out of the VR, and sticking them back into real life, the RL.”
The decision to produce the project as a broadsheet was also intentional. Mr. Shore felt newsprint echoed Instagram, in that it wasn’t too precious.
“Newspapers are dying left and right,” Mr. Boling elaborated. “It occurred to me one day that what I really like about the [Sunday] New York Times is just the look and feel of it. I like seeing that I’ve got a little ink on my fingers when I’m done. Because it’s rarer, now, as a publication. I think it acts a speed bump. It slows you down, and causes you to look at what you’re seeing in maybe a different way.”
The Documentum team plans three more Instagram-related issues. The next will feature photos with text, followed by an issue that highlights vernacular imagery. Documentum allows its artists to “take over” their Instagram account, and hopes the audience will begin to participate as well, by suggesting, or “shouting out” artists on the @documentum.tv feed.
Because the feedback loop is central to social media, Mr. Boling said they hoped to include audience work in the future. And for all the photographers out there who obsess about their likes and followers — even if you won’t admit it — you are not alone.
When Mr. Shore was asked whether he pays attention to likes from his 62,900 followers, he admitted that he does.
“Yeah, I pay attention to it,” he said. “As a percentage of followers, I think I don’t get a lot of likes.”
Jonathan Blaustein is an artist and writer based in New Mexico. He contributes regularly to the blog A Photo Editor.
Follow Documentum on Instagram. @jblauphoto, @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook and Instagram.
News 22/05/16
Do You Follow Stephen Shore On Instagram?
Interview with Teju Cole
Why do you use Instagram?
I like to use Instagram as yet another place to think about images, about the life of images. In my regular work, I'm a photography critic, in addition to being a photographer and a novelist. I find that Instagram can be a place to play around with those categories, and to communicate directly.
Is there a story behind your Instagram account?
On Instagram, I like to explore the possibilities of matching ideas and narratives to pictures. I am interested in the tension that exists when a piece of text is set side by side with an image. I'm currently working on an informal project on Instagram called "The Hive," which looks at work, in pictures and in words. I do two or three of these every day, as a kind of extra daily practice. I have about ten thousand followers on Instagram, and its good to always be presenting new material to them.
Venice, October 2014. The island is called the Giudecca, "the Jewry," thought there's no proof that a Jewish community ever lived there. I've been walking for hours. I'm lost as usual in the places where other people call home. In Italy, I have a feeling that I'm only able to articulate later on: that perspective does not exist in other places, only here. Naturally, I blame this on the influence of Italian painters, the way their seeing has seeped into my skin. While I am scanning this negative this evening, at the very moment the scanner is whirring, I get an unexpected text message from A., who is a doctor: "One of my patients is a holocaust survivor. 93 year old. Still has ptsd and screams at night." #_thehive
Brooklyn, October 2015. Unable to direct my labor in the ways that were expected of me, I for many years thought of myself as lazy. I carried that shame inside. It was my fundamental flaw. Later, I found that there were things I wanted to do. Not things to achieve, but things on which I wanted to expend the hours of my days. A number of these things became possible to pursue, through quite a bit of luck. It became my life to work with words and images in various ways. This was when I realized to my surprise I wasn't lazy at all. I was disorganized, but I actually had a tendency to overwork. This is who I am? It came as a shock. Not everything was enjoyable, but so long as it was driven by some personal necessity, I was willing to pour myself into it with intensity. I couldn't help but pour myself into it. It was almost as shameful as being lazy, almost as costly. I woke up and dove into the work. At night, I didn't want to sleep. #_thehive
From one photographer to another—what is so fascinating about Stephen Shore’s images?
Their commitment to daily life, to the look of things as they are. I like the unfussy democratic eye of his imagery. And I like his unflagging energy after all these decades!
Do you follow Stephen Shore on Instagram? If so, is there a certain Shore-ism that appears in his posts?
Yes, I follow Shore, and have actually interviewed him and written about his use of Instagram on the New York Times. As I wrote in that piece: "The images he posts there, like most of the photos he has exhibited in galleries or published in books, are made in full color and with a cool, matter-of-fact style that delicately balances beauty, banality and irony. The medium, dimensions and means of circulation have all changed. What remains is Shore’s eye, his commitment to a visual annotation of the world."
Teju Cole is a Nigerian-American writer, photographer, and art historian. On Instagram as @_tejucole.
Instagramfoto’s vereeuwigd in blad van papier
Tijdschrift
Het kwartaalblad Documentum archiveert en onderzoekt de foto’s van vluchtige online media als Instagram.
Rosan Hollak
26 juli 2016
Is een foto aan de muur in een museum of afgedrukt in een fotoboek belangrijker dan een beeld op Instagram? Ook professionele fotografen plaatsen ontelbaar veel foto’s online.
De kwestie hield ook de Amerikaanse fotograaf Stephen Shore bezig. Samen met uitgever William Boling begon hij dit jaar het tijdschrift Documentum, een kwartaalblad geheel wijd aan online fotografie.
Doel van het tijdschrift is om „de culturele eendagsvliegen van onze tijd te archiveren en onderzoeken”. Een opvallend project, aangezien online fotografie, dat juist niet als doel heeft om in print te verschijnen, nu dus weer een plek krijgt op ‘de ouderwetse manier’. „Een foto gedrukt op papier heeft meer eeuwigheidswaarde”, zegt Boling, die in Amsterdam is om het tweede nummer van Documentum bij PhotoQ bookshop te presenteren. „Noem me ouderwets maar ik denk dat mensen nog altijd graag een krant in handen hebben en het fijn vinden dat een selectie wordt gemaakt uit al die miljoenen foto’s op Instagram.”
Dit jaar is het blad, gedrukt op krantenpapier, geheel gewijd aan Instagram, daarna volgen andere onderwerpen. Het eerste nummer – dat met een oplage van duizend exemplaren in maart verscheen – had als titel Vol 1: The Instagram Series. Het doel was om te laten zien welke kunstenaars inmiddels veelvuldig gebruik maken van Instagram en hun werk kunnen uitdragen als een kunstvorm op zich. Dat leverde een aardige, maar weinig coherente collectie beelden op van kunstenaars als Chris Rodes en Phillip March Jones en van beginnelingen zoals de Indiase schrijfster Buku Sarkar, die een Instagram-reportage maakte van de grootste moslimwijk in Calcutta.
Mensen kijken graag naar een foto op papier.
En ze willen een selectie uit het enorme online aanbod.
Het tweede nummer, met als thema Pictures & Words, is sinds vorige week uit en laat zien hoe tekst en beeld elkaar kunnen aanvullen. Boling verwijst in het blad naar Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), het fotoboek van de Amerikaanse fotograaf Walker Evans en schrijver James Agee over katoenplukkers tijdens de Grote Depressie. Documentum probeert een soortgelijke eenheid van tekst en beeld opnieuw tot stand te brengen.
Ook al is het resultaat zeker niet te vergelijken met de klassieker van Evans en Agee, en is ook hier weer het aanbod erg breed, toch zitten er geslaagde werken tussen zoals de woord-beeldcollage van Adam Bell of de op Saul Leiter geïnspireerde beelden die de Pakistaanse journaliste Naveen Naqvi maakte van Vancouver en Karachi.
Ook de Amerikaanse schrijver en fotograaf Teju Cole creëert een nieuwe wereld met een simpele foto van een stoel aan een tafel en een korte, literaire tekst over een familie in een appartement in Lissabon. Die combinatie werkt: met weinig wekt hij direct een gevoel op van melancholie.
De volgende editie van Documentum, gepland voor oktober, gaat over ‘Crosscut’: „het hoge en het lage, het gewone en het banale”. Dat is een breed thema. Maar dat we inmiddels weer de mogelijkheid hebben om in rust te kunnen kijken naar het werk van al die ‘eendagsvliegen’, is in ieder geval winst.
Documentum (€ 24) online te koop bij Photoqbookshop.nl en bij het Nederlands Fotomuseum. Op Instagram: instagram.com/documentum.tv
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