Uncommon Places

"El Paso Street, El Paso, Texas. July 6, 1975. Stephen Shore/Aperture Foundation"

The New York Times' Michael Kimmelman, has this to say about the photograph:

Two years later Mr. Shore went to El Paso, Tex., and photographed, from the back, a slump-shouldered man, in an untucked white shirt, waiting on a street corner in the slanting sun of the late afternoon. Painted lines of the crosswalk before him recede toward the Capri theater at the center of the photograph, where the movie “Lady Kung Fu” was advertising itself in big red letters on the marquee. Like a Renaissance painting, the picture unfolds in one-point perspective. Everything is still, held in place by the strict geometry, while the colors — baby blue, yellow, red and avocado green — bounce and shimmy.

I am floored by the above description, by what Mr. Kimmelman can see.

I can sure take snapshots, everyone can. But I just can't possibly take what seemingly look like snapshots like Shore's or Winogrand's. My mundane is really just mundane and can never transcend and levitate to the level of great photography. I tend to like their aesthetics, their no nonsense approach to taking pictures. You know at least it's easy to execute their approach, going around taking pictures of the mundane and banal. It gives me hope at least.


Shore's Americana kind of makes me think of Wong Kar Wai's aesthetics. Wong is very immaculate, very organized chaos. Wong's take on Americana can be seen in his latest movie "My Blueberry Nights."

In a Cannes press conference, Wong says,

"All through the years we've seen a lot of films made about Chinese from foreign directors and sometimes it looks very embarassing and because a lot of these Chinese characters have been distorted and hmm ... it's too exotic. So, I always want to make a film in a different language but I (don't want) hmm .... want to avoid this problem."

I am sure his version of Americana will be very different from say Spiderman-3 as he jokingly and eloquently put it in another interview. Whether "Blueberry" is just another "Zzzz" or turns out to be a major art house success in addition to "Zzzz" like "In The Mood For Love" has yet remain to be seen.

Source: Passing Mile Markers, Snapping Pictures by Michael Kimmelman.