What Stephen Shore Knew About Shooting Boring Places

TITLE: What Stephen Shore Knew About Shooting Boring Places CHANNEL: The Photographic Eye DATE: 2026-04-13 ---TRANSCRIPT--- Take a look at this photograph taken on the 21st of June 1975 by Steven Shaw. This is the kind of photograph that I used to look at and go, I I just don’t get it. It’s a couple of petrol stations. It’s a McDonald’s. It’s a sort of view that was not a million miles away from my drive every day on the way to photo school. So why does this photograph hang in the museum of modern art? What does Steven Shaw understand about photographing ordinary places that at the time I was completely missing? How’s it? Welcome back to the photographic eye. And if you are tired of guessing whether your photographs are any good, then you are in the right place. Now before Steven Shaw, I had been brought up on the idea in photography of looking for interesting things to photograph in an interesting way. Now that idea is not something I came up with by myself. None of us do. Every decision we make with a camera has been put into our heads by everyone who has ever told us what their definition of a good photograph looks like. Now Steven Shaw has a word for that. He called it conditioning. And what he set out to do in those early ‘7s with all the photographs that ultimately became uncommon places was to find a way to work against it. So what is it that actually makes these photographs great? Well, this is something that it took me ages to figure out. When you look at Steven Shaw’s photographs in each of them, there is something subtle. It’s doing a major job. It’s a visual anchor. It’s a place your eye gets drawn to first that gives it somewhere to sit before it starts actually exploring the frame. It’s completely different to all the nonsense that we see on Instagram these days trying to bash you in the face with a with a hero subject. In the San Francisco photograph, it’s for me it’s that white flat iron building in the middle there, right? That isn’t a hero subject. It’s so small in the frame, but it is doing something important. It’s giving that eye somewhere to land. And once my eye has landed there, that eye is free to go exploring the scene. So in my case, I drift off to the right. I see the cinema signs. I see that red ball and a pole. And I come to the front of the frame. Then I drift across to the left. I see more cinema signs. And I come back to the white building. And there’s also a little circle 76 petrol station there, which goes quite nicely with the red ball across the road. But what makes this all possible apart from the anchor is the empty road. Fill that road with cars and make it busy and the whole circuit my eye takes breaks down. My my eye can’t make a leap across the road anymore. So that emptiness isn’t missing content. It’s not something to be filled. It is actually it’s a path. What I would do when I was a student is I’d see work like this. I think, okay, everybody thinks that’s great. Surely, okay, so I just go and photograph the street as it is. And I would go out onto the ptorious streets and and my photographs would just be um they’d be a hot mess, right? But I I importantly I didn’t know why. And I also had another problem is my lecturers when I asked them for help would focus their attention on the more technical aspects in my photography. Not because they’re bad teachers, but because I didn’t know what to ask them for help with, because I didn’t have the language yet. Now, that language, knowing what to ask for, knowing what you’re looking at, is something we cover in depth within the TPE tribe. And if you’d like to learn how to see using that language, then click on the link in the description box below. Now, there’s something else that I really struggled with when I was a student and and this is the thing that’s completely absent from my photographs. Color. In first year, we had to shoot exclusively in black and white. Now, look at the good food picture. Where does your eye go to first? Where did it go to first? In a San Francisco photograph. Both times it is pulled to a color. But in black and white, watch what happens. Both these photographs in black and white, those anchors disappear. The whole frame collapses into not necessarily a gray noise, but it doesn’t have nearly the same sort of crap, but it shouldn’t be frontless. It doesn’t need to be like the hero. It just needs to be something that allows us to land. So that’s the first lesson. You know, busy photograph isn’t always just a hot mess. What really rescues it, though, is that anchor, right? So, that first lesson about the busy photograph and and how Steven Shaw is stopping it all falling apart is all well and groovy, but what happens when we photograph the opposite? Scenes where there’s almost nothing really in there at all. Why is it that Steven Shaw’s photographs of smaller things could also be considered great? But look at this photograph. It’s a It’s a burger, couple of fries, a milkshake, scratched tabletop. It’s like like again, what is the point of this photograph? Why is this considered to be any good? And my 20-year-old self would have said, “Well, it isn’t. It’s just rubbish. They’re only they’re only saying that because he’s a famous photographer.” But my 50-year-old self looks at it and and starts to go, “Okay, now I see what’s happening. Every object in the frame is standing on its own. The burger, the fries, the milkshake, the scratches on the table. My eye wanders. It’s not being bombarded with a million things. Just a couple of objects. And once again, it is free to take its time to pay attention to each of the objects in turn. So I start going, I I wonder who Jenny was, right? And I’m fairly sure that those fries are are pretty much cold by now. And and did Steven ever finish the hamburger? But because there’s not one single thing shouting at me, I end up looking at all of it. spend time a lot longer with these kind of photographs than I would with something louder, more in my face. And and that’s what makes it work. When you’ve only got a handful of elements in the scene, they all have to work together. They have to be like an ensemble in a in a play. They can’t just be jo jostling jostling jostling right for attention. The burger isn’t fighting the milkshake. The fries aren’t fighting the scratches on the table. Everything belongs. Add in an element that doesn’t fit with this blue hat or something and the whole thing collapses. Then it’s a photograph of the blue hat. Think about it. This picture looks very casual, but every object, every color is pulling its weight in harmony. Think about it like this. A blockbuster film, it performs at you. says, “I am going to bombard you with grand explosions and things like that.” And yet an art house film, it says, “Come, come, come sit with me.” It asks us to spend time. And what my 20-year-old self didn’t have was the patience to sit with a photograph the way that we would sit with an art house film. I I was stuck in this trap of of waiting for the exposure. Where’s the big lighting? Where’s the Where’s the massive scene? Where’s that decisive moment? Things that were easy enough for me to recognize and point at in a photograph say, “Well, that’s why a photograph is good.” But the lesson here is not about, you know, just get a couple simple objects. It’s about how we have to suggest to somebody that this is a photograph that they can spend time with. It’s not just random haphazard collection of bits. They’re put together in a way that they work together. So, let’s go back to where we started. The chevron sign, the street, the McDonald’s, the telephone poles, the the the mountains in the background. As I said, I used to look at that sort of very selfsame scene every day when I drove to photo school. But now look at it again with those two lessons that we’ve been talking about in mind. Where’s the anchor for me? It’s the red chevron sign. Just pulls our eye in first. Not loud, not brash. It’s just there. Gives my eyes somewhere to land. And from there, our eye is free to wander around the block. We see Texico. Then across the street is McDonald’s. I think it’s like 85 cent fries or burger or something. Right. There’s the telephone wise, the mountains hazy in the distance. Everything is working in harmony. Nothing is fighting. Nothing feels forced. And most importantly, nothing is like shouting, saying, “Look at me. Look at me.” And suddenly, this photograph isn’t just a street anymore. It’s a photograph that knows exactly what it’s doing. That’s what Steven Shaw saw when he walked along there. That’s why that particular corner on the 21st of June 1975 is the one that I couldn’t see for 30 years until my eyes were ready to understand it to know aha that’s what makes these photographs great and it helps me make that choice within my own pictures. But there is one more thing that I’d like to share with you and that is what has taken me the longest time to notice here that these photographs are quiet. In a world where every photograph is competing for attention, Shaw’s photographs linger. They’re not really trying to sell me a feeling. They are simply letting a moment sit in front of us and letting us decide what we want to find in it. And that quietness isn’t because the scenes themselves are quietness. The quietness is something that Steven Shaw has brought to them. Yeah, it’s confession. It’s like for the longest time I was making photographs for other people trying to earn a reaction, you know, shock value that in your face kind of stuff cuz it was simple. It was easy. I could, you know, point it and say that’s why it’s good. But these days, 30 years after stumbling over Steven Shaw’s work for the first time, I am now more content making photographs that look firstly nothing like Steven Shaws because this is not what this is about. is not about copying his work, but hopefully taking some lessons from his photographs that leave the people who look at my pictures with the same feeling. Quiet still images that might linger with a viewer rather than just scrolling past, but it still doesn’t really answer why Steven Shaw’s photographs are considered to be great. And for that, we have to go back a couple of years. when I was in Boston with a TPE tribe event and we went to go see a Robert Frank exhibition and I asked the curator why these photos matter. Why are they good? Why are Robert Frank’s photos good? And she thought about it for a moment and she said they allow the photographers who came after Robert Frank to take photographs like this. And that’s what Steven Shaw’s photographs have done for me. They didn’t teach me to shoot like him. What they have done is given me permission to take the photographs that I want to take. Now mention is a is a word that Steven Shaw has within him and that’s that is a word that I keep coming back to again and again. I feel that sympathy. That’s what Shaw looking at his work that’s what I get. sympathy what’s in front of the camera. Sympathy for the way that we actually see the world rather than the way we think we’re supposed to see it because of that conditioning. When we photograph like that, that’s when the common becomes uncommon. Not because of the place, not because of the event, but because of the way that we look at it. And once we see the world that way, even just once, then we really can’t unsee it. Now, if that shift from being left wondering why your photographs aren’t working to being able to see why they do and having the words to express that, if that’s the shift that you want to make in your own photography, then come and join us at the TPE tribe. Over the next 90 days, I will help you learn the language of photography so you’ll know what makes a great photograph, how to apply that in your own work. Thank you ever so much for watching. It’s been an absolute pleasure and uh I will see you again soon.