In the book, The Nature of Photographs, author Stephen Shore writes: “For some pictures the frame is active. The structure of the picture begins with the frame and works inward…the world of the photograph is contained within the frame. It is not a fragment of a larger world.” Shore used his 1975 photograph, El Paso Street, El Paso, Texas to illustrate his point. I began to question if there were other ways in which the content of a photographic image could be isolated. Irving Penn did it when he isolated his subjects from their surroundings. This photograph is still a document of a place, but it is also an aggregate of geometric shapes and colours. By abstracting the building from it’s surroundings it becomes more about the latter. It’s a kind of combine of the methods of Shore and Penn.
Edward Lewis 