Stephen Shore

Stephen Shore on His Love of the Game

Rail: Could you talk about what you were interested in with the baseball photographs?

Shore: It could not be simpler. I love baseball. When Ginger and I were dating and first living together in ‘77 and ‘78 we were probably averaging thirty games a year, and in those years we went to every home game that Ron Guidry pitched. He was at the peak of his form and it was amazing to watch him. This was a large part of my life and some of those people were my absolute heroes. [The third baseman for the Yankees, Mickey Mantle, was one the most eloquent baseball players I’ve ever seen play]. It’s the simplest thing. I like posing problems for myself. The idea of photographing a sport with an 8×10 camera—it’s interesting.

Rail: The idea of finding those exposures—1/8th of a second, 1/15th of a second…

Shore: Some are faster, but part of it is that in a number of different motions there are often moments of rest, so if a batter is waiting for a pitch and is going like this (gestures) the moment that the ball leaves the pitcher’s hand he goes (make a gesture) but only for a fraction of a second before he starts to swing. But if my timing is right I get him like that. There’s all this kinetic energy, but he’s absolutely still. There’s this one point of balance or transition of energy that, if your timing is right, you can stop the action with a view camera.

I don’t know if you’ve ever seen any of the black-and-white New York street pictures I’ve done. The idea of doing Winnogrand-esque street photography with an 8×10 camera—I thought, this would be interesting to do.

Excerpt from an interview in the Brooklyn Rail