art+food

January 23, 2012

I bought this book almost a year ago, and I’ve been meaning to post about it, but I couldn’t figure out how. In the end, I suppose a visual approach is best. This is Der Rote Bulli: Stephen Shore and the New Düsseldorf Photography. It’s a study of photographic influence.

Stephen Shore met Hilla Becher in 1973, the same year he started using a large-format camera and began making what would become Uncommon Places. Hilla suggested that he should photograph “main streets all over America”, in line with the Bechers’ typological project, but Shore decided he wasn’t interested in cataloging main streets. He was interested in “the quintessential main street.” Hilla and her husband Bernd, with whom she made all her photographs, helped bring Shore’s work to Germany. When Shore and the Bechers participated in the New Topographics exhibition in 1975, the Bechers were the only Europeans in the show. Bernd Becher would go on to become an influential teacher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, inspiring generations of photographers who are sometimes known as the “Düsseldorf school” of photography. Well-known names from the school include Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, Elger Esser, Candida Höfer and Axel Hütte.

This book, then, focuses on Shore’s influence on a generation of German photographers. There is a lot of text in this book, which is bilingual (every other page in German and English, making for some slightly disjointed reading). But there really isn’t any need for excessive theorizing. The evidence for the book’s premise—that Stephen Shore, via the Bechers, has had a big influence on the photographers who came out of the Düsseldorf Art Academy—is right there in the pictures. The real point of a book like this has to be the photographs. In addition to Shore and the Bechers, there are 21 photographers featured in the book, several of whom I was pleasantly surprised that I hadn’t heard of before. Sadly, some of the less well-known names are hard to find much about, or by, online.

Jörg Colberg did a video review of this book, where he pages through quite a bit more than I’ve shown in this post. This is a heavy, dense and expensive book, but it’s definitely worth paging through if you get the chance. Some of the artists featured in this post: Claudia Fährenkemper, Miles Coolidge, Kris Scholz, Matthias Koch. (I trust you know about the Gurskys and Ruffs of the world.)