Afterword

Take Stephen Shore’s photograph El Paso Street, El Paso, Texas, July 5, 1975 (1975). Two men could almost be said to be facing off against each other, except the man in the foreground looks off to his right, presumably as he waits for the ‘Don’t Walk’ sign to extinguish. The man across the street, perspectivally smaller, leans almost unnecessarily – dare I say, languorously – against a post which holds a sign: ‘One Way’. He looks off to his left, more or less in the same direction as the man in the foreground. Could they be looking at the same thing, casually? A relatively unimportant event that just so happens to be out of the camera’s view? Immediately behind the smaller man are two blurred, moving figures, confirming what we might already have known – that this is a photograph taken with a view camera, most likely on a tripod. In an interview with Shore, Michael Fried describes a strange effect, originally identified by Shore, that occurs when the viewer shifts focus from the foreground to the background of a photographic image.