24 Quotes by Stephen Shore

The context in which a photograph is seen affects the meaning the viewer draws from it.

If you’ve met one person with autism, you’ve met one person with autism.

To see something spectacular and recognise it as a photographic possibility is not making a very big leap. But to see something ordinary, something you’d see every day, and recognize it as a photographic possibility – that is what I am interested in.

I’m always interested in finding new aesthetic problems to deal with and challenge myself, even if the aesthetic problem is one of content.

Photographers have to impose order, bring structure to what they photograph. It is inevitable. A photograph without structure is like a sentence without grammar-it is incomprehensible, even inconceivable.

With a painting, you’re taking basic building blocks and making something that’s more complex than what you started with. It is a synthetic process. A photograph does the opposite: It takes the world, and puts an order on it, simplifies it.

I think I misunderstood Instagram and just thought it was people photographing their friends, and discovered there were a number of people, a number of artists, who were taking it very seriously and doing very imaginative work with Instagram as the medium.

A photograph has edges the world does not.

A lot of the photography I’m doing and thinking about is directed at Instagram.