SEMINAR POSTPONED. APPLICATIONS ARE CLOSED.

2-DAY SEMINAR WITH STEPHEN SHORE
“THE NATURE OF PHOTOGRAPHS”
SATURDAY JUNE 13 + SUNDAY JUNE 14, 2020
BOWEN ISLAND/VANCOUVER, BC, CANADA

What are photographs today? It merely took a decade to revolutionize in fundamental ways how the world looked at and did photography for over half a century, profoundly transforming the medium’s visual culture and its disputed claim as an art form.

Enter the brave new world of Instagram publishing, hypermedia presence and unending social media sharing: what does being a photographer truthfully mean now? What essential parameters should one consider in order to legitimate someone taking pictures as such? Or couldn’t it all rather have to see with the actual making of photographs, that one enduring defining act of photography? Even so, hasn’t the nature of photographs itself changed forever?

Who else but Stephen Shore, a most seminal figure of color photography and a noted early adopter of digital technology, to circumnavigate the muddled waters of our photographic moment? Take part in a once in a lifetime conversation as he lays out the extent of his 45-year understanding of the medium and draws clarification from his many groundbreaking books, paying particular attention to The Nature of Photographs, the precious offspring of his extensive academic career at Bard College.

Throughout this seminar participants will also have the opportunity to contribute a number of individual questions correlating their work and practice to the ongoing discussion (more details in the seminar description below).

© Cover image: Stephen Shore, Holden Street, North Adams, Massachusetts, July 13, 1974

ABOUT STEPHEN SHORE

© Photo credit: Alec Soth

Stephen Shore‘s work has been widely published and exhibited for the past forty-five years. He was the first living photographer to have a one-man show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York since Alfred Stieglitz, forty years earlier. He has also had one-man shows at George Eastman House, Rochester; Kunsthalle, Dusseldorf; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Jeu de Paume, Paris; and Art Institute of Chicago. In 2017, the Museum of Modern Art opened a major retrospective spanning Stephen Shore’s entire career. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. His series of exhibitions at Light Gallery in New York in the early 1970s sparked new interest in color photography and in the use of the view camera for documentary work.

More than 25 books have been published of Stephen Shore’s photographs including Uncommon Places: The Complete Works; American Surfaces; Stephen Shore, a retrospective monograph in Phaidon’s Contemporary Artists series; Stephen Shore: Survey and most recently, Factory: Andy Warhol and Stephen Shore: Selected Works, 1973-1981. In 2017, the Museum of Modern Art published Stephen Shore in conjunction with their retrospective of his photographic career. Stephen also wrote The Nature of Photographs, published by Phaidon Press, which addresses how a photograph functions visually. His work is represented by 303 Gallery, New York; and Sprüth Magers, London and Berlin. Since 1982 he has been the director of the Photography Program at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY, where he is the Susan Weber Professor in the Arts.