On July 6, 1973, Stephen Shore had pancakes for breakfast at the Howard Johnson’s in Lima, Ohio. Afterwards he drove to the nearby city of Delphos1 and took three photos: of the intersections of 2nd and 4th at Main, and of the Pitsenbarger Supply Company on 3rd, its brick side wall painted with a small square advertisement for Scherger Monuments (“Preserve Ancestry for Posterity”).
Having taken his photos, Shore then did something unusual: he left some photos. Rather, they were photos of similarly nondescript scenes from similarly nondescript small towns that he had taken earlier then had professionally printed as postcards. He left 30 of them in Delphos that day; he didn’t say where, but the way he worked was to place them into drugstore postcard racks with the others when no one was looking. Then he moved on. By lunchtime, he was in Battle Creek, Michigan, taking more photos and leaving more postcards.
Shore crisscrossed the country that year doing this same thing. He’d printed 5,600 postcards, so he had a lot of ground to cover, and he kept track of it all in a ledger that included copies of his prints, notes on meals he ate, where he stayed and what he watched on TV in his hotel room, ephemera like business cards, gas receipts, parking tickets and, in neat block print, lists of “Exposures Made” and “Postcards Distributed.”
Pages from the 1973 ledger, some of the postcards, and photos Shore took throughout the ’70s and early ’80s are on display at the International Center of Photography in an exhibit titled Biographical Landscapes, and it’s great in its similarities and ordinariness. The large-format color photos show anonymous architecture of highways, intersections and side streets, billboards and signs, gas stations and parking lots, hotel rooms and fast food meals. This stuff would have been completely ordinary and probably boring to someone then, but now the clothing, the cars and the graphic design have a mystical quality and it’s hard to believe any of it ever really existed.
What’s the point of Shore’s work? He’s a New Yorker, born and bred, so a viewer’s first instinct might be to label him a parodist of the oft-maligned middle part of the country, although his images are presented almost exclusively without comment or irony. It may just be, as he said later, that the ledger was borne from “a fascination with how certain kinds of facts and materials from the external world can describe a day or activity,” and that the photos were records of these days and transitory memories. It’s as if he collected traces and evidence to prove to himself that he was where he was. It reminded me of a quote I’ve saved by Cornell University anthropologist Sam Beck: “People need to create their own history, to leave traces of themselves and of the meanings they generate....to leave trails, to say, ‘we are here’....”
Shore’s gone digital and since 2003 has been using Apple’s iPhoto photo-book service, in which the company will professionally print a hardcover book of a digital photo album. There was one at the exhibit that included photos he had taken in New York City a few years ago of pedestrians, signs and cars, and sure enough, I found it dull. But how about in 35 years?
The exhibit didn’t mention whether Shore ever revived his postcard project, but it amuses me to think he may have, just as it amuses me to imagine that Shore’s postcards from the ’70s could lie pressed and yellowing in family scrapbooks, depicting places the senders never were.
1 Until she married, my mom lived in a tiny farm village just outside of Delphos, which is sort of why I selected it for this anecdote. [back]